practical use to them than
Sanscrit would be. Geometry was as abstract as metaphysics. They had
never learned it by solid figures, or studied it intelligently. Grammar
was a memorized collection of dry abstract rules and examples. Natural
history was only a catalogue, and geography a dictionary learned by
heart.

Our manufacturers, who had occasion in former years, to employ these
youths from our Public Schools, found them utterly incompetent for using
their faculties on practical subjects. Nor did they go forth with minds
expanded, and ready to receive the germs of knowledge which might be, as
it were, floating in the atmosphere. Their faculties had not been
aroused.

The "Object System" attempts to lay down the principles which have been
tested in primary education, in the form of a Science; so that the
teacher not gifted with the genius of invention and the talent for
conveying knowledge shall be able to awaken and train the child's
intellect as if he were.

Its first principle is to exercise the senses, but never during any long
period at once. The play of the children is so contrived as to employ
their sense of touch, of weight, and of harmony. Colors are placed,
before them, and they are trained in distinguishing the different
delicate shades--in the recognition of which children are singularly
deficient. Numbers are taught by objects, such as small beans or
marbles, and then when numerals are learned, regular tables of addition
and subtraction are written on the board by the teacher at the dictation
of the scholar.

The great step in all education is the learning the use of that
wonderful vehicle and symbol of human thought, the printed word.

Here the object system has made the greatest advance. The English
language has the unfortunate peculiarity of a great many sounds to each
vowel, and of an utter want of connection between the name and the sound
of the letter. No mature mind can easily appreciate the dark and
mysterious gulf which, to the infant's view, separates the learning the
letters and reading. The two seem to be utterly different acquirements.
The new methods escape the difficulty in part by not teaching the names,
but the sounds, of the letters first, and then leading the child to put
his sounds together in the form of a word, and next to print the word on
the black-board, the teacher calling on the scholar to find a similar
one in a card or book. By this ingenious device, the modern infant,