492 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
idea as constantly as possible in view, and not to distract the ardent 
mind with purposeless and disconnected scraps of learning. 
I ask you to bear this distinction in mind, for it is a principle which 
may guide us in differentiating university methods from school meth- 
ods of education. 
The distinction need not involve us in a discussion of the “ Ziel- 
Angabe ” in elementary education, for that is rather a question of keep- 
ing the interest alive during each lesson than of maintaining a perma- 
nent purpose in view throughout a course. 
The much-discussed heuristic method as apphed to very young 
children does, no doubt, fulfil this object so far as it provides the in- 
quisitive mind with novelty instead of a set task, but so far as it makes 
the purpose more prominent than the process it may become a method 
more suited to the adolescent or the adult mind than to that of the 
young child. 
T can fully realize that a most difficult and anxious time for the 
teacher must be that of the maturing intellect, in the interval between 
childhood and the close of the school career, when the method and 
spirit of the teaching must to some extent gradually change with the 
changing mental characteristics of the pupil. But, whatever may be the 
right methods of teaching children of ten and young men and women 
of twenty, many of our failures are due to one or both of two prevalent 
mistakes: the first, the mistake of teaching children by methods that 
are too advanced; the second, that of teaching university students by 
methods that are better adapted for school children. It is with the 
latter that I wish to deal in this address; but we may in passing remind 
ourselves that when young men and young women are sent straight 
from the university to teach children with nothing but their university 
experience to guide them, it is not surprising that they often proceed 
at first on wrong lines and as though they were dealing with university 
students. 
The difficulty of divesting oneself of the mental attitude and the 
form of expression familiar in university circles, if one is to become 
intelligible even to the higher classes in a school, is betrayed by the un- 
satisfactory nature of many of the papers set by university examiners 
to school children. The teachers complain, and rightly complain, that 
there is often an academic style and form about them which just make 
them entirely unsuitable for the child. 
It is, of course, hopeful that a diploma in pedagogy or some evidence 
that they have received instruction in method is now generally required 
of those who are to become teachers in schools. It seems to me, how- 
ever, somewhat curious that, while efforts are now being made to give 
instruction in educational method to such persons, no similar effort is 
made to give instruction in more advanced methods to those who are 
ealled upon at the close of their undergraduate career to become uni- 
