1898.1 essays/ , 'V ^' 63 



edge, it huth perverted thee." Yrs^kee'- sagacity ^as aj»ways 

 looked with distrust on "book learning,^'- still it ha8.jy3fr1e to be 

 the vastly predominating kind of learning in our public schools. 

 And why should this be? The idea that the child knows some- 

 thing when he has learned to say it from a book is the great stum- 

 bling block now in our public education, and the only hope for 

 our present situation, the only remedy for this parrot-like edu- 

 cational farce, seems to lie in the direction of improving the 

 quality of knowledge taught in the school. 



As a matter of education, do we ponder enough and learn as 

 much as we might from the way a little child begins to study the 

 world in which he finds himself? A baby sleeps most of the 

 time the first year and still at the end of three years it has been 

 estimated that he has made more actual progress and learned 

 more things than in thirty years following. At the end of this 

 early period, the brain has grown to be about five-sixths the size 

 of the adult, and the development of this important organ is 

 completed, so far as weight is concerned, by about the sixth or 

 seventh year for girls and the eighth or ninth for I)oys. In this 

 very early period, before formal schooling is begun, the child 

 learns by what we call the natural method. He learns things, 

 realities about him, by direct contact ; he feels, smells, tastes, 

 sees, hears the objects about him, soaking in unconsciously, as 

 it were, an infinite amount of information At the end of this 

 period, our school system changes rather abruptly, a child's 

 method of learning from the real and natural to the symbolic. 

 In place of studying things, he must study numbers, arbitrary 

 figures which represent things, and woi'ds which tell about 

 things. 



We may represent the natural method of education and the 

 symbolical by this simple example : Suppose we had set before 

 us the task of learning a furnished house outside and in. We 

 nn'ght sit down to a book as thick as a dictionary and study 

 through it page after page, learning it faithfully by heart, all 

 about the arrangement of doors, windows, outside grounds, 

 everything of that sort ; and even after we have done all this, 

 what would such knowledge amount to? Suppose instead we 



