Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 43.djvu/62

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52
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

so many pages per day, and from the teachers recitation-hearing, marking, and reporting, his schools were eminently successful. Teachers, pupils, and patrons neither knew nor desired anything better: but that sympathy with childhood which had led Mr. Sheldon into this work was not satisfied with these poor results. Five years of growing dissatisfaction with the current range of

E. A. Sheldon.

subjects and methods of instruction had culminated in a determination to prepare some books and charts for himself, when a visit to Toronto revealed the object of his search. He saw there in the National Museum, though not used in their own schools, collections of appliances employed abroad—notably in the Home and Colonial Training School in London. Evidently the seed sown by this school had not found in Toronto so good a soil as in the mind of this Yankee schoolmaster. From this visit he returned with the delight of a discoverer of a new world, laden with charts, books, balls, cards, pictures of animals, building blocks.