of necessity. It will dig in the ground, and build houses; its play will be a microcosm of the labors of the race.

is no study on his part, no conscious effort to obey, no self-consciousness.

It is the part of the Kindergartener to study Moral growth, like intellectual, comes from each child to see that no half-hour passes withthe exercise of the moral faculties, and this in- out growth in some way; to train up strag volves freedom, since only when one volun- gling branches on these her human plants; tarily chooses the right is there moral action. to give unwearied love, and patience, and Only when the child without pressure from study, and faith that if she but supplies the without chooses the right, feeling full power proper conditions God will see to the growth. to choose the wrong, has it accomplished a Fræbel's one hope in life was that the moral victory. Froebel learned with humility children of the poor and vicious could have from mothers, and at first felt that they alone this training. For himself, always poor, he of all the world could be entrusted with spent much of his life in the huts of poor peothe early training of children; but finding, on ple, watching mothers with their babes, and studying their lives, that after the first three he saw how hard and sad their lives were. He years the mother cannot devote herself wholly felt that the reformation of the world must to her child, finding, too, that the child often begin with the lowest; that while the superlongs for the society of its equal, and that it is structure of society rests on this vast foundaoften better for the mother and child to be tion of ignorant humanity, no matter how we apart for a little while each day, to relieve the | build above, the whole is unsafe. strain on her nerves, that she might be calm and strong the rest of the time; and finding that it would be long before mothers generally would even study the science of human growth, he wished to place children where the conditions he thought requisite to growth could be fulfilled. For a long time he sought for a name-but standing in the garden one day | and enjoying the beautiful unfolding of leaf and bud, under the warm sun, he exclaimed, "Oh, let it be a garden of children where God and nature shall not be prevented from dealing with each one."

A Kindergarten, then, is a place where the natural methods of growth are aided. Where amid music, and plants, and sunshine, under the genial care of a loving student of child

The poor children of our city,-born to do without so much that makes life valuable, kept with so much that degrades here in the midst of our Christianity, beside our home—have they no rights? Has the love of the Father which makes us all brothers and sisters, given us no privileges toward them? To this society of women, met for the study of Social Science, I commend this subject, believing there is no other so worthy of their attention. Indiana School Journal.

TEACHING THROUGH THE EYE.

THE

W. G. WARING.

HROUGH the eye is the direct way to the

upon.

nature, each good trait shall be strengthened brain, quiet as the operation is. and each depraved growth die through neglect; a place where every natural tendency of Children weary very soon of mere talk, the child has perfect freedom to grow up, and which few can make clear enough and simple where, while the child feels free to do as it enough for them to understand, or feel interpleases, and nothing but things in themselves est in. They want something visible or tanimmoral is prohibited, yet the prevailing influ-gible to confirm and anchor their new ideas. ence shall help him to choose the right. In a Kindergarten, then, the time is divided between plays that unite with physical culture, grace, music, kindness, the culture of the imagination, the imitation and motions of animals, and work of grown people; which give constant chances to govern and obey other children, to lead and to follow, and in which each must be in harmony with the spirit of the play; and work, as the children call the occupations at the tables, when the child passes slowly from the solid through the surface and line to the point, and embodies these again in perforating, drawing, plaiting, and clay. To the child all is joyous play; there

In the schools of our village object lessons are given every day, teachers taking turns to visit and talk to each other's schools while their own is conducted by some high school student. When our children come home, I often question them as to what they have learned in this way. If some actual object has been shown and used for illustration, they come of themselves, eager to tell and explain the new knowledge they have gained. But if it has been "all talk" they come but shyly, even when called, for they feel that the lecture which "came in at one ear, has gone out at the other." They have had no spool

on which to wind the thread of it; nothing for the eye to take a picture of.

It is hard to say whether the powers of external or of internal vision possessed by the eye are the most wonderful. A mere glance outwardly suffices to receive and retain enough for the tongue to tell of for an hour. And the inner vision has such capacity that a moment serves for the recall and view of any scene, any picture, any word, that the eye has ever fully photographed. A young lady home from church, will recall no end of items, gathered by the slightest glances of the eye. The ear has heard service and doctrine for an hour, but a sentence or two will give you all that it has retained. Children see and recall even more quickly than adults, and they retain better the images of things seen.

the elements of reading, and then spelling, were illustrated at an Institute which I attended lately. Several classes were exercised by their teachers as if in school. Little ones of 6 to 7, read words by putting the sounds together, and then sentences by putting the words together, doing it with a charmingly easy and natural intonation. Then, as a means of sealing and securing the impression of the figure of the word, they were next exercised in recalling it, and they did this by a process which seemed to astonish the audience. The teacher wrote on the board the homographic signs which represented the sounds in a word. As soon as he had the homograph written they were ready to analyze and pronounce it. And when he had some eight or ten words thus chalked down they were drilled a few turns in calisthenic movements to freshen them up and then di

graphs and then translate them into letters. They showed their slates round the wondering audience. It was manifest first that they could enunciate the words with perfect rendering of every sound; second, that they could recognize and pronounce them at a glance; and third, that they could see the words so distinctly by introspection or inward vision, as to be able to copy them from memory only, with the letters arranged just as they had seen them in the book, their only guide being the pronunciation given in sound-signs. They could spell them too by hand-the only spelling ever practically wanted. This is thorough work, but they liked it. They could see their way all through.

It may be said that in teaching reading we necessarily use the eye, We use, ordinarily, but half its powers, employing only the exter-rected to take their slates, copy the homonal vision, whereas its introspective service can be most usefully engaged, as we shall presently see. In teaching geography great advance has been made through the use of outline maps and globes which show configurations so well. In grammar there is much gained by dividing the sentence into its main and subsidiary expressions, with enclosing lines which map it out into a main hall or avenue with extensions of attached rooms or passages; these again having, oftentimes, their closets or courts. In arithmetic and geometry our best schools use, increasingly, more and more of illustrative figures or bodies, but still more might be done to retain the aid of the eye. In teaching the tableslineal measure, for example the scale of inches (and of centimeters, too) should be marked on every slate, ruler, and copy-book; and measurements should be made of everything on or about the desk; first roughly in inches, then in eighths, then in centimeters, and finally with the precision of millimeters. (The scale is easily transferred from the edge of one of the sheets of stationery supplied by the Metric Bureau, Boston. On entering upon tables of capacity, actual pint and litre measures should be used, with a box of saw dust, with which to make 2 pints 1 quart, and so on to bushels. Tables of weights should be similarly illustrated by balance scales. A five-cent piece will give the weight of a gram. In fractions a clear base is gained by showing first the unit-one thing of any kind, and then its parts-pieces, fractions. Keep the unit in view. Employ the eye.

Methods of using the inward as well as the outward vision of the eye in teaching, first,

Other classes dealt similarly as to recalling and copying the inwardly seen images of harder words, phrases and sentences; the higher classes showing equal expertness, both in rendering selected words into homographs and in translating homographic 'dicteé' into standard orthography. It was explained that the pronunciation of a word, as "ache" for instance is shown in sound signs in order that only the correct letter-form shall be seen and imaged in the memory. Such mere orthoepic spelling as ake or aik, being false in practice, are never shown in letters but only in homographs.

"I see now," said a friend, a director from another county, "I see into it. I judge of my own spelling by looking at how I have written it. I don't trust my ear. I never pretend to say over the names of the letters now as I did at school. All that, work was for nothing, or nothing but harm. It wasted time to no end, and made me sick of the spelling-book and

all connected with it. I remember how I
had great trouble with the word 'sugar.' I
had the idea or the picture in my mind of an
sh at the beginning of the word. And I had to
make a special practice of writing that word
over and over, looking hard at the 's' before
I could get rid of the 'h.' I believe in start-ant changes of method.
ing children as they should go on, and it's
very plain that they can learn spelling a great
deal easier and faster by the eye than by the
ear. They should begin that way and go on
that way.
These little dots, with their slates
and their lively tones, show that it's a pleasant
way as well as an easy one. But, I declare !
I'm astonished to see them. As for the
bigger ones their work is tip-top. I must get
our teachers to look into this."

ooee iks, for the same two sounds in choux.
See also articles on p. 196, Dec. No., and
p. 4, 2d col., July No., "Prove all Things."
Every teacher in actual practice, and every
school that is preparing teachers for fullest
usefulness, should make a test of these import-

"A distinguished teacher in Germany has written to Prof. Adrian Scott that spelling, all over Germany, has been crowded out by the sound method which teaches the sounds represented by the letters, and pays no attention whatever to their names. Only a few quite aged teachers still employ spelling." (N. Y. Tribune, Jan. 16.)

CORRECTION OF FALSE SYNTAX.

most profitable of language exercises. Parsing HE correction of incorrect speech is one of the and analysis may be useful as instruments in the study of the structure of language, and may be necessary as technical modes of recitation in grammar. The calling of attention to inaccuracies and the correction of such inaccuracies, however, must be more directly practical, if by this term is meant what conduces to the right use of language. To discover and correct errors should tend to make the one who does it more careful and more accurate.

It may be questioned whether "false syntax" made for the purpose is the best form of such exercise. The sentences put into the grammars to be corrected are sometimes so full of errors, are so impossibly bad, that no learner should be set to the task of making them right, the very contact with such English doing his speech more harm than his grammatical knowledge gets benefit from the corrections made. The sight of stage of a child's power in the use of language, danthem, and still more the sound of them, is in a certain gerous because such errors are infectious. Sentences full of errors can hardly be kept from a child's ears, they are so common; but ought they not to hear them as seldom as possible, and ought they ever to see them printed? Whatever may be the cause, there seems to be a wonderful power, amounting almost to fascination, in very bad English over a learner's mind. Many correct the sentences, and then use them ever afterward. Is it done in a spirit of unconscious revenge for what they regard, too often, as dry aud useless lessons in grammar imposed upon them? It is certainly one of the many instances in which evil example speedily bears fruit after its kind.

The method here referred to may be illustrated by taking one word, for example, "schuh," which has precisely the same pronunciation and the same meaning as the English word "shoe." There are but two sounds in it, although the Germans use five letters and the English four. These sounds are sh and oo. The old way of teaching the child to read required him first, in the case of every word, to first learn by heart its senseless, useless, rigmarole of letter names; this being, for the word schuh, ess, tsay, haw, oo, haw. (Then the child is to say "shoo.") The new way simply treats sch as one letter, its sound being sh, and its name of little or no consequence. So with uh, which is one letter, one soundthat of long oo. Knowing this, once for all, the child can put the two sounds together, and pronounce the word at first sight, and will delight in doing it. By the other old way, stumbling blocks, that he can neither see through nor over, are heaped in his way, and he is driven over them by dint of superior force. In English we do just as barbarously, but as the poor innocents don't know enough to remonstrate, and as we are hardened into habit by constant reiteration (like those "aged teachers"), we hardly see or feel our wicked cruelty and waste. Instead of feeding children's minds with digestible and strength-little differences between our own speech and that of ening food, such as they crave, we drug them with such stupefying formulas as ess aitch oh ee, for shoe; as the French, too, (see p. 239, Jan. No.) used to put them through se he oh

A better practice is, to correct sentences which are found in print or heard in conversation, and which are in the main correct; that is, to make quite right sentences which have been used for ordinary purposes but are inaccurate in one or two particulars. The mistakes in ordinary good speech, made through inattention or through ignorance of some of the less commonly known principles of language, are far more worthy of attention by the learner than the grosser vulgarities of the wholly ignorant. The former give opportunity of profitable criticism; the latter are hardly worth it. We cannot acquire the habit of good English by expending grammatical knowledge and labor in making decent speech out of the slang of the street so readily as by attending closely to the nearly perfect expression of correct writers and speakers. The habit of attending to the correct modes of speech so that we make our own conform to them, that we may notice

our superiors in the use of language, rather than any formal application of rules of syntax to sentences made or compiled for the purpose of being purged of purposely introduced solecisms that we may hereafter avoid these solecisms, will lead to better practice.

The instinct of good English comes from contact with good English and careful discrimination of varying modes of expression both within, and outside of, any rules which would be profitable for a pupil to learn, as rules. Indeed, very many of the corrections which fairly good English requires to make it good English, are not covered by rules which can properly be called grammatical. The agreement of verbs and subjects, the right comparison of adverbs and adjectives, not using two negatives in a sentence, may be put under rules which the pupil may be required to learn, but entire conformity to all that is generally given in these rules still leaves much more to be done to insure language which is more than technically cor. rect, language which is good as well as grammatical. Many of the proprieties of speech-what all would recognize as such-cannot be half so well stated in a rule as they can be felt in an example by one who is familiar with good English as well as with technical

Of the sort that are hardly worth correcting, but which should, almost, be made state-prison offenses, this is one : A person who, with a company of such, had been parading and talking all day in a palace car after the usual manner of the vulgar-rich, declared in a voice which all were obliged to hear, after a short lull in their continual clatter of tongues, "Wall, I hain't slep a wink; no, sir." The glory of rings and chains and rich furs, and the obsequiousness of porters, went down before this illustration of “Speak, that I may know thee." National Teachers' Monthly.

PRACTICAL EDUCATION.*

BY S. M. GIBBS.

OME man once wisely said, "Teach your boys

grammar, and many times, a correction which is given what they will practice when they become men.

a reason and without quoting a rule does far more good than to detect those which a rule or an observation in some particular grammar can be found to cover. The most careful writers sometimes furnish "examples for correction." If young pupils may correct the sentences given for that purpose under "Rule V," or "Observation VI," and may report in the grammar class any errors they have heard in school, older ones would find it a useful language exercise to notice inaccuracies they may find in their reading of wellwritten books. Please to observe that it is not said they should search good books to find in them flaws of language, but while they are reading they should notice, among many other points, expressions and constructions which are to be avoided by them as erroneous or inelegant. I recently heard a teacher say, "There's an omnibus goes to every train." Addison, in one of the Roger de Coverley papers, says, "There was a man below desired to speak with me." Nevertheless Addison is an English classic, while he and the school teacher are unequal except in the one small point of incorrect construction in the two sentences. If one desired to be very critical he would correct a child who says he will try and do better, and would tell him to say try to do; yet in "Chapter XV," Book II, of Daniel Deronda, so accurate a writer as George Eliot says, "try and secure Diplow as a residence." It is not yet recognized good English to put an adverb between the sign to and the verb; yet Herbert Spencer writes, "unless the pupil is intelligent enough to eventually fill up the gaps." I heard a teacher say to her class, "you cannot get your lesson without you study," and the author of Nicholas Minturn, in Scribner's Monthly writes, "it was two mornings after Mr. Benson's conversation that the former reached the culmination of his schemes."

Much less frequently found in good books, but still very frequently used by those who know better in spite of their incorrect habits, are such expressions as: "I should thought," "he lives a long ways off," "he is home now," "he seldom ever has his lesson," "read a couple of pages," "you can learn it, if you are a mind to," "take the balance of the chapter to-morrow," "I've no sympathy for your laziness," "such answers don't set very well," "you will study this subject the rest of the season," "I meant to have told you yesterday;" all of these the writer heard from the teachers since he was asked to write this article for The Monthly. This is not to say that they are not good teachers of other subjects, and of language-in the main.

To appreciate and apply this saying requires a correct understanding of man's true sphere, as a social, rational and immortal being. Without this broad, enlighted conscientious appreciation of man's true destiny, all theories of education have no more significance than the baseless fabric of a vision," and are unworthy to be entertained for a moment by a rational intelligence.

66

Much is said in these days about "practical education." And Commercial College men and narrowminded utilitarians have restricted the name to those common branches of learning that common men commonly use in common business.

What is practical education? We must confess that the adjective adds nothing to the substantive. A right and complete education cannot help being practical. Yet because we find so many mistakes current in respect to what is practical, we offer some suggestions which may help to correct these mistakes and to set before you the true standard of the practical.

Education is the drawing out into full development all the faculties of the mind and soul. The faculties of the mind are reason, perception, reflection, memory and judgment. The faculties of the soul are the affections, the right education of which determine them to their proper objects, and against such things as would mar and injure the human nature. Evidently any course or programme of education that aims at any narrower culture than this, deserves not to be called practical. Call it something else. Say we call it a fractional education, but let us not abuse the word "practical."

It must be confessed that what helps a person to honest success and prosperity in the world is a thing to be desired and sought after. We are not such dreamers as to leave the necessities of life out of view. The res

frumentaria must not be overlooked. The acquiring of any special knowledge with a view to a particular calling or pursuit, is no more than learning a trade or handicraft. A well-educated man will almost invariably be a scholar and a gentleman, a man of taste, culture and refinement. But a surveyor, civil engineer, a book-keeper-yea, even a teacher, may be a prig and a boor, a slave to bad habits and to prejudice, and always arrayed against truth and morality. Education 100ks higher, and wider; it respects humanity and

*Read by S. M. Gibbs, Principal of the Graded School, Willsburg, Pa., before the Chemung County, New York, Teachers' Association, at Southport.