1892.] Editorials. 1015 
drunkard-stomach physiology ; but experimental work demands more 
training and more brains. The new curriculum demands better trained 
teachers, it provides more practical information for the student; and 
when we remember that the majority of our children leave their 
schools behind at the close of the grammar school grade, the necessity 
of some such change as that here outlined is self evident. 
This subject of increase in the scope of our lower schools is attrac- 
tive, and when upon it one scarcely knows where to stop. Custom and 
incompetency have forced so many things upon us and inertia sv main- 
tains them as they are that a change is a matter of the greatest diffi- 
culty. Yet everyone who has studied carefully even the so-called 
pattern schools of the larger cities of Massachusetts sees that they 
occupy an enormous amount of time with ridiculously small results. 
They regard the infantile mind as so much plastic material which must 
be pressed into a conventional mold and the time necessary for this 
shaping is regulated by that of the dullest intellects. The children are 
drilled in the spelling of words like phthisic, and eleemosynary, which 
they will never have oecasion to use until they arrive at years of 
maturity, and they are kept at the simple problems of addition and 
multiplication until they are perfect in them, utterly regardless of the 
fact that this perfection is to be obtained only through practice, and 
that this practice is to be had in abundance in all the subsequent 
arithmetical work. Time enough can be gained right here for the 
insertion of some observational science without the omission of a 
single useful principle or fact. 
Whether it is actually so, or whether it is one of the fictions of our 
national pride, we are given to regarding the youth of the United 
States as intellectually the equals of those of any other nation, but it 
is a mortifying fact that when we compare our children with those of 
an equal age trained in the schools of Germany and France ours are 
the sufferers. These foreigners know more things and they know them 
more thoroughly. They have, at the close of the grammar school 
grade, not only a knowledge of the “three R’s,” but they have a 
grounding of at least one language, and they know besides, the elemen- 
tary principles of several sciences. The writer believes that with 
proper instruction our children can equal them, even with our 
absurdly difficult orthography, and he welcomes this step on the part 
- 
of the Association as in the right direction. 
