OS JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS. 



tendency to misplaced sympathy, too much being given the scholars 

 and not enough shown for their painstaking teacher. I have never 

 taught school myself, as far as day schools are concerned, but I will 

 admit to having had a little experience in Sunday school work, and 

 from what I encountered there I am disposed to sympathize very 

 much with the teacher, and I think that if the different classes of 

 educational methods were put on another footing far better results 

 would be achieved. 



I have already expressed my disapproval of the tendency to 

 multiply studies, but I have no objection to a variety if properly 

 managed. In my own experience at the schools I attended, 

 during the acquisition of my elementary education, many subjects 

 were actually crammed into my memory which I have long since 

 forgotten. For instance in the common school we used at one time 

 to memorize long columns of dates without any information as to 

 the events they represented, but these have long been forgotten, 

 never to be recalled, except perhaps when the same figures are pre- 

 sented to notice, as the number of a telephone — my tailor for in- 

 stance has the same number as the year that one of the English 

 monarchs came to the throne. During my professional course, 

 though, I had an experience that I think might be utilized as a par- 

 tial solution of the difficult problem of arranging children's lessons. 

 At the medical school we had, as is more or less the case everywhere, a 

 certain number of didactic lectures, and on every subject we had to 

 attend two courses. These lectures we used to take down in our 

 note books more or less fully. When the time came for the second 

 course of lectures we would find that our professors would often re- 

 peat the lectures word for word, and accordingly used to adopt 

 the plan of following the lecture with our old notes, making additions 

 when any new matter was introduced. Then, on returning to our 

 boarding houses, instead of reading up our notes as we had to do 

 when first we took them down, we could read up our books of ref- 

 erence or text books on the same subject. Now why could not a 

 similar plan be adopted in our public schools. Let the teachers 

 teach the subjects in the schools and then let there be home work 

 bearing on the work of the schools, with just enough to learn to fit 

 the scholars for long enough examinations next day to show that they 

 have profited by the teaching of the day before. 



