se are causal and
rational, and not merely confined to description. So I go back to what I
said awhile ago apropos of verbal memorizing. The more accurately words
are learned, the better, if only the teacher make sure that what they
signify is also understood. It is the failure of this latter condition,
in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, that has caused that
reaction against 'parrot-like reproduction' that we are so familiar with
to-day. A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to examine a
young class in geography. Glancing, at the book, she said: "Suppose you
should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you
find it at the bottom,--warmer or colder than on top?" None of the class
replying, the teacher said: "I'm sure they know, but I think you don't
ask the question quite rightly. Let me try." So, taking the book, she
asked: "In what condition is the interior of the globe?" and received
the immediate answer from half the class at once: "The interior of the
globe is in a condition of _igneous fusion_." Better exclusive
object-teaching than such verbal recitations as that; and yet verbal
reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective work, must
always play a leading, and surely _the_ leading, part in education. Our
modern reformers, in their books, write too exclusively of the earliest
years of the pupil. These lend themselves better to explicit treatment;
and I myself, in dwelling so much upon the native impulses, and
object-teaching, and anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to
the line of least resistance in describing. Yet away back in childhood
we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the
intelligence of abstract terms. The object-teaching is mainly to
_launch_ the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts
concerned, upon the more abstract ideas.

To hear some authorities on teaching, however, you would suppose that
geography not only began, but ended with the school-yard and neighboring
hill, that physics was one endless round of repeating the same sort of
tedious weighing and measuring operation: whereas a very few examples
are usually sufficient to set the imagination free on genuine lines, and
then what the mind craves is more rapid, general, and abstract
treatment. I heard a lady say that she had taken her child to the
kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he saw through it immediately."
Too many school children 'see' as imm