By Irving Browne.
CURRENT TOPICS. The New Education. — It is apparent that with the opening of the twentieth century some novel ideas of public education will begin to have sway. It has long seemed to many that the scheme of the same education, above the rudimentary branches, for all children without any adaptation to their peculiar tastes, aptitudes and powers, is radically wrong. The common schools and the academies, and to a great degree the colleges, treat the student too much like the Procrustean guest, and stretch him out or chop him off to fit the educational bedstead. The cram ming of mathematics into a philosophical or literary mind which abhors them, or the stuffing of elegant letters into a mathematical intellect which despises them, is worse than waste time. How many a sturdy English boy has grown to hate the Greek and Latin classics because of their birch accompaniment, and how many a poetical or philosophical youth has shed tears over a task of figures of mathematics when he would fain be at figures of speech! It is in a great measure due to President Elliot of Harvard Univer sity, and his associated college presidents, that the community is becoming impressed with the notion that education should be addressed to drawing out rather than to putting in; to development of powers which are in the student, rather than to the endeavor to treat all as if all were alike in powers, and to stuff them accordingly; to cram the memory rather than to train the faculties. The Easy Chairman heard this idea of the New Education very beautifully ex plained recently by President Hyde of Bowdoin Col lege. It embraces not only mental training, but to a reasonable extent, physical training. This is but reverting to Plato with his music and gymnastics. It is recommended by these instructors that educa tion should embrace a certain amount of gymnastics of the kind calculated to develop the body without overstraining it or endangering it. Statistics gath ered at Wellesley College (for girls) show the great superiority in scholarly standing of those who have pursued the gymnastic course over those who have not, to say nothing of their superior healthfulness.
Then attention is to be paid to manual training to some extent — to the teaching of the use of the hands in useful or ornamental occupations. Charles Reade, if living, would insist very loudly on the wis dom of teaching ambi-dexterity, and would very violently denounce the parents and teachers who did not instruct every child how to use both hands in differently. Gymnastics could of course be taught in the common schools, but special manual training probably could not, at all events for many years to come, nor until the public mind becomes educated up to this high ideal; but perhaps in the course of another generation the public will see the wisdom of teaching in the common schools a certain amount of manual dexterity. In. respect to mental training the central idea is to educate the child in that for which he exhibits an aptitude or taste, and not to burden his mind and benumb his faculties with things that he hates and cannot understand. It is the opinion of many that the months and years spent in drilling the feminine mind in mathematics are worse than wasted. What is the use to the average girl of an attempt to gain knowledge of mathematical astron omy? She does not need to know, and generally can never learn how to calculate eclipses. On the other hand, nine-tenths of the pianoforte instruction of young girls is so much time and money wasted, for it does not develop the mental faculties, and it in jures the physical powers. When the girl marries it is supplanted by the sewing machine. The pianoforte is the genteel curse of. American girl-life. Much better to teach the use of the sewing machine. The plea that it is necessary to teach a child things which he cannot comprehend, and which he merely commits to memory, and utters mechanically like a parrot, in order to " train his mind," is the sheerest nonsense. One might as well set up a race-course for paralytics or cripples in order to develop their physical powers. Some minds are by nature utterly incapable of the higher mathematics, and when such a mind is presented for instruction it is cruelty to bend it to such a course. Mathematics are by no means essential to a lawyer, a clergyman or a phy sician, and the Easy Chair has hardly ever known one who could do a sum in advanced fractions or '77
