PROFESSIONAL TRAINING OF TEACHERS. 78) 
except that of saving the teachers as much trouble as 
possible, and of producing the maximum apparent result . 
in the minimum of time, utterly disregarding the effects 
of such a process upon the natural development of mind. 
The method, which is most irksome to the intelligent, 
thoughtful pupil, easiest though unprofitable for the super- 
ficially sharp one, and agonising for the so-called dull boy, 
is the method of rote-learning. 
Such learning has been condemned for generations by the 
greatest thinkers on education—we can glibly cite their 
words, but utterly ignore their significance. Montaigne’s 
“Savoir per coeur ce n’est pas savoir,’’ would be in reality 
as much a new gospel to this generation as it was three 
hundred years ago,and Comenius’ strictures on the verbalism 
of the 17th century might be directed with equal justice 
against the 20th. Our own experience as teachers, and the 
experience of the world outside the walls of the schoolroom, 
tend to show the futility of rote-learning. The process of 
manufacturing “elaborate ”’ parrots, of which Mr. Thring 
speaks, is not gone through without some risks to the 
unhappy individuals under torture. How frequently do we 
hear the complaint that a boy who did so brilliantly at 
school could not get on at the University, or of one who, 
having taken high University Honours, did not succeed in 
after life. Yet teachers still cling to a system which has 
been proved even from their own utilitarian point of view 
to be a failure,-and they are ready to champion it because 
it is a cheap, though temporary, advertisement of their 
work. Sir Joshua Fitch, in his Lectures on Teaching, says, 
“Many men have been saved by the badness of their 
memories from the ruin of their understandings,” and we 
can realise the truth of this when we come across cases, by 
no means uncommon, of boys who commit the propositions 
of Euclid to memory, without having the slightest apper- 
ception of the terms they use. 
One illustration will recall similar incidents to the minds 
of many teachers. Two boys on their way to school. A 
says to B, “Just hear me this proposition—-Construction, 
Drop a perpendicular.”’. B, who has still some glimmerings 
of ambition to understand something of what he is talking 
about, “But what is a perpendicular?” A, indignant at 
the interruption, “ How should I know ?—oh, where was I? 
Drop, &c.”’ 
The schoolmen, as the educators of the Middle Ages, were 
accused of discoursing of matters incomprehensible in unin- 
telligible terms. Are we so much in advance of them now, 
when we persistently, as Thring declares, talk Chinese to 
