ON THE CURRICULUM OF EDUCATION IN NATIONAL SCHOOLS. 19

education. Our children go from school to homes where, in themajority of cases, the Police News and the novels of the Family Heraldare the very highest specimens of literature ; and, therefore, there isnothing in the conversation of home to help on the work of theschool, and the exercises there are for this reason exercises whichoverload the memory, because there is no corresponding intelligenceto share the weight of the burden of imparted knowledge. Take aninstance out of your own experience, and yet how far better wasyour home than that of the children of whom I am speaking. Remem-ber your own proficiency in Latin , French , or any foreign language.Did you enter into communion with the thoughts of those greatwriters whom you wearily translated into slipshod English , as youspelled out word by word in the dictionary? The teaching, the ele-vation came, when education, having done its work, you were insympathy with the thoughts of others, and turned back with newinterest to the old books.

What good, then, did you get out of the study of the classics inwhatever language your reading lay? Not the good you are apt toimagine when you look at the books now-a-days, or when your read-ing illustrates some passage, the bare words of which you committedto memory years ago, but the good, the inestimable benefit whichyou derived from the calling out of your powers of memory, of obser-vation, and of that nameless but most useful faculty, which we maychristen “ drudge”—that power of grappling patiently with an invin-cible difficulty, and not allowing it to master you, though your victoryover it leaves you exhausted and without visible advantage.

If what I have adduced be true, then the question between us andthose who wish to introduce the sciences into schools, is which arethe best subjects of instruction for developing these powers? Iventure to speak with certainty wdien I say that the amount ofscience which children will require in schools will, for reasons after-wards to be stated, be practically nil. But I do not believe thattherefore the teaching would be useless could it be properly given.I believe it to be an open question, 'whether language, history, orscience be the best subject for training the mind, for educating,calling out those powers which are afterwards to be used.

The old idea of military discipline is passing away—men are nolonger to be drilled into machines, the individual capacity of eachman is to be developed, and as of old the battle depended on thephysical power of each individual, so, in these modern times, it willdepend on the mental calibre of each soldier. And so in the educa-tional world, the day has gone by for the notion which has obtainedamongst some that you can turn a boy out with all the elements ofknowledge which will make him successful in life. All you can dois so to educate him that he may choose, and choose intelligently, thatline of life which will suit him best and grapple successfully witheach difficulty as it arises before him. But if science is to be taughtm our elementary schools we must have certain requisites before wecan hope to teach it.

When the Pestalozzian system was yet young object lessons were

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