Education (Volume 4) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: it broadly. We should set about a reorganization of our whole school curriculum, and by a carefully-devised plan secure the orderly progress of the child's culture from the kindergarten age through an elementary course suited to his expanding mental and bodily powers, and then through a course of scientific education,?not distinct from, but supplementary to the former,?until as a high-school graduate he should possess, so far as nature has endowed him and opportunity favored, a general preparation for the duties of life. In such a course manual training should enter at a proper time and proceed through an elementary, if not also through a scientific, stage, to the end "that a trained hand may accompany a disciplined intellect." Of such a remodeling in educational ideas the promise, I confess, ris not immediate. But to this result, I believe, the criticism of schools, now so abundant and so annoying, is tending. Some of this criticism is unwise, often even ignorant and unjust,?ostracising an Aristides without suggesting even a Themistocles,?and so is hurtful to the progress of right ideas ; yet out of all this agitation will come in due time educational truth. Meanwhile, let us not be dull in thought nor slow to act. As gleams of this truth are revealed to us, let us allow them to shine upon our daily range of labor, and if we can, like the prism, transmit them with added beauty to our fellow- workers. Manual training as a regular study will not come into general use to-morrow or next year. Let me suggest a simple plan by which, until it shall come, we may encourage voluntary effort of this kind among our scholars. For three years past in Fitchburg, Mass., we have held in our high school, on the last day of the fall term, an exhibition of hand-work. A few weeks in advance the...