Mental Discipline in Education. 445 



Science also has great advantage, as a means of mental 

 discipline, in the incentives to which it appeals for arousing 

 mental activity, its motives to effort being such as the 

 pupil can be made most readily to appreciate and feel. 

 The reasons for studying the dead languages are not such 

 as to act with inspiring force upon beginners : hence 

 motives to exertion have largely to be supplied by external 

 authority, which necessitates in the school discipline a de- 

 cided coercive element, while those who administer it, 

 having little sympathy with " new-light " notions about 

 making study pleasurable, lighten the student's tasks by 

 the enlivening assurance that wearisome toil is evermore 

 the price of great results. 



This is the old ascetic misconception of the controlling 

 aims of life false everywhere, fatal in education. The 

 free and healthy exercise of the faculties and functions is 

 so pleasurable as to be universally spoken of as a " play " ; 

 who, then, has the-right to turn it into dreary and repulsive 

 task work ? The love of enjoyment is the deepest and 

 most powerful impulse of our nature, and the educational 

 system which does not recognize and build upon it violates 

 the highest claim of that nature. The first thing to be 

 done by the teacher is to awaken the pupil's interest, to 

 engage his sympathies and kindle his enthusiasm, for these 

 are the motors of intellectual progress; it is then easy to 

 enchain his attention, to store his mind with knowledge, 

 and carry mental cultivation up to the point of discipline. 



This is of the first importance. Flogging has been the 

 accompaniment of education for centuries; and although 

 the humanizing agencies are slowly bringing us out of this 

 barbaric dispensation, yet the penal policy, or that which 

 makes the fear of pain, in one shape or other, the chief 

 incentive to effort, is still prevalent. This not only ap- 

 peals to the lowest motives, but is self-defeating. Pain- 

 ful feelings are antivital, depressing, fatal to mental spon- 



