TV AND WHERE TO FIND IT 87 



Where is there any approximation to it? Has 

 any one tried to found such an education ? 

 Looking over the length and breadth of these 

 islands, I am afraid that all these questions 

 must receive a negative answer. Consider our 

 primary schools and what is taught in them. A 

 child learns : 



1. To read, write, and cipher, more or less well ; 

 but in a .very large proportion of cases not so well 

 as to take pleasure in reading, or to be able to write 

 the commonest letter properly. 



2. A quantity of dogmatic theology, of which 

 the child, nine times out of ten, understands next 

 to nothing. 



3. Mixed up with this, so as to seem to stand or 

 fall with it, a few of the broadest and simplest 

 principles of morality. This, to my mind, is much 

 as if a man of science should make the story of the 

 fall of the apple in Newton's garden an integral 

 part of the doctrine of gravitation, and teach it 

 as of equal authority with the law of the inverse 

 squares. 



4. A good deal of Jewish history and Syrian 

 geography, and perhaps a little something about 

 English history and the geography of the child's 

 own country. But I doubt if there is a primary 

 school in England in which hangs a map of the 

 hundred in which the village lies, so that the 

 children may be practically taught by it what a 

 map means. 



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