522 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



peated with tiresome iteration, but seldom is a question raised 

 about the value of the ideas taught. Do the charts and books for 

 primaries express aught that is unfamiliar to children ? Rather 

 do they not contend for the merit of expressing most completely 

 the commonplaces of child-life ? Is there anything worthy to 

 be called thinking or capable of arousing interest and emotion in 

 memorizing combinations of symbols, and associating them with 

 familiar and trivial ideas ? And let us see what "object-lessons" 

 chiefly deal with. Last year, in a normal school of the Empire 

 State, a teacher of primary methods, proudly claimed by her prin- 

 cipal to be the best in the State, gave thimbles, scissors, chairs, 

 etc., as suitable subjects for object-lessons, and carefully led her 

 pupils through the steps required to develop in children's minds 

 ideas of the parts and the uses of these objects. Is there one child 

 in five hundred, at six years of age, ignorant of these parts and 

 uses ? Then the so-called development process is a farce, and a 

 waste of time and energy. Look over manuals of object-lessons 

 and courses of study for primary children : you will usually find 

 but few subjects leading the child from the beaten path of his 

 daily life into new, inviting, and fruitful fields ; and of these, note 

 the directions as to what is to be taught. Such directions often re- 

 semble a lesson on a butterfly that I heard given by a kindergart- 

 ner. With a single butterfly held in her hand she led the children 

 to speak of its flying in the sunshine, sipping food from flowers, 

 living through the summer, and of the beauty of its colors. Not 

 a word was said of the three parts of the body, the two pairs of 

 wings, the six legs, the antennse, and the tube through which it 

 sips food— all of which and more the children could easily have 

 been led to see. Doubtless the teacher thought the children had 

 had a beautiful lesson ; but had they received anything at all ? 

 Although city children, they spent the summer in the country-— 

 they had all seen and probably chased several species of butter- 

 flies, and possibly some of them knew more than their teacher 

 about the habits of butterflies. 



Think of children gathered by fifties in thousands of school- 

 rooms, spending the first years of school-life in repeating trivial 

 facts and ideas that have heen familiar from babyhood j in learn- 

 ing the symbols for these ideas, and in counting beans and bits of 

 chalk ! The five-year-old boy who described a kindergarten as 

 "the place where they are always pretending to do something 

 and never doing it," and the eight-year-old girl who, after read- 

 ing the first few paragraphs of some ordinary i)rimary reading 

 matter, looked up at her teacher and said, " I think' these sentences 

 are very silly, don't you ? " are not alone in preferring the lessons 

 of the street and the field to those of the school-room. In such 

 dealing with trite ideas the child gets little mental exercise, gets 



