BRAIN WORK AND MANUAL WORK. 193 



rational economy of the scholar's time is always kept 

 in view, and theory goes hand in hand with practice. 

 Viewed in this light, the Moscow results do not seem 

 extraordinary at all, and still better results may be 

 expected if the same principles are applied from the 

 earliest years of education. Waste of time is the leading 

 feature of our present education. Not only are we 

 taught a mass of rubbish, but what is not rubbish is 

 taught so as to make us waste over it as much time as 

 possible. Our present methods of teaching originate 

 from a time when the accomplishments required from 

 an educated person were extremely limited ; and they 

 have been maintained, notwithstanding the immense 

 increase of knowledge which must be conveyed to the 

 scholar's mind since science has so much widened its 

 former limits. Hence the over-pressure in schools, and 

 hence, also, the urgent necessity of totally revising 

 both the subjects and the methods of teaching, accor- 

 ding to the new wants and to the examples already 

 given here and there, by separate schools and separate 

 teachers. 



It is evident that the years of childhood ought not 

 to be spent so uselessly as they are now. German 

 teachers have shown how the very plays of children 

 can be made instrumental in conveying to the childish 

 mind some concrete knowledge in both geometry and 

 mathematics. The children who have made the squares 

 of the theorem of Pythagoras out of pieces of coloured 

 cardboard, will not look at the theorem, when it comes 

 in geometry, as on a mere instrument of torture devised 

 by the teachers ; and the less so if they apply it as the 

 carpenters do. Complicated problems of arithmetic, 

 which so much harassed us in our boyhood, are easily 

 solved by children seven and eight years old if they are 

 put in the shape of interesting puzzles. And if the 

 Kindergarten German teachers often make of it a 

 kind of barrack in which each movement of the child 



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