The Project Gutenberg EBook of Following the Equator, Part 7
by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

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Title: Following the Equator, Part 7

Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Release Date: June 24, 2004 [EBook #5814]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOLLOWING THE EQUATOR, PART 7 ***

Produced by David Widger

FOLLOWING
THE EQUATOR
A JOURNEY AROUND THE WORLD
BY
MARK TWAIN
SAMUEL L. CLEMENS

Part 7

CHAPTER LXI.

In the first place God made idiots. This was for practice. Then He made
School Boards.
--Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar.

Suppose we applied no more ingenuity to the instruction of deaf and dumb
and blind children than we sometimes apply in our American public schools
to the instruction of children who are in possession of all their
faculties? The result would be that the deaf and dumb and blind would
acquire nothing. They would live and die as ignorant as bricks and
stones. The methods used in the asylums are rational. The teacher
exactly measures the child's capacity, to begin with; and from thence
onwards the tasks imposed are nicely gauged to the gradual development of
that capacity, the tasks keep pace with the steps of the child's
progress, they don't jump miles and leagues ahead of it by irrational
caprice and land in vacancy--according to the average public-school plan.
In the public school, apparently, they teach the child to spell cat, then
ask it to calculate an eclipse; when it can read words of two syllables,
they require it to explain the circulation of the blood; when it reaches
the head of the infant class they bully it with conundrums that cover the
domain of universal knowledge. This sounds extravagant--and is; yet it
goes no great way beyond the facts.

I received a curious letter one day, from the Punjab (you must pronounce
it Punjawb). The handwriting was excellent, and the wording was English
--Engli