blic
and private, is decided more by the publishers than by the educators.
Hence the graded series of School Geographies, for instance, through
some five or six of which the pupil is obliged to wade, one after
another, to find in each, only the same matter in sentences of a
somewhat greater length. Hence, to go one step farther, the stupefying
of so many minds in our schools. Nothing is more deadening to all mental
activity than unmeaning repetitions, a fact easily verified by any one
who, wakeful through mental disturbance at night, will take the trouble
to repeat and re-repeat any meaningless thing. It is the lounging,
deadening brain-work of which we have too much, not the active,
vivifying brain-work of which we have too little, that does injure the
system. The whole healthy tone of the mind is destroyed, and evils,
mental and physical, follow in rapid succession.

From the process of text-book manufacturing also spring the endless
number of compendiums and abstracts with which our schools are deluged,
mental power diluted, and the pockets of the parents unnecessarily taxed
for the support of large publishing houses, not for the education of
their children.

Another cause of this stupefying process is the rigid system by which
most large schools are conducted, where promotions, from one class to
another, can take place, say, once a year, the pupil who, on
examination, falls short of the required per cent of correct answers,
being forced to review the work of the entire previous year before going
on. More elasticity, more fluidity, as it were, is sadly needed in our
system of public school education before this evil will be to any great
extent modified.[20]

It would be a waste of time to say that one ought not to be overworked,
were it not that some persons always seem to imply that any intellectual
work is overwork. It would seem equally superfluous to say that for
intellectual health there ought not to be any surplus energy, for the
latter statement seems as axiomatic as the former.

The problem with which educators are chiefly concerned is that of fully
employing the energies without overtasking them. If the dividing line
between _enough_ and _too much_ could be determined as exactly as the
Mississippi River marks the series of lowest points where the eastern
slope of the Rocky Mountains meets the western slope of the Alleghenies,
our work as teachers were easy indeed. Teaching, however, is not the
only prof