om met with who,
having given an entirely wrong answer to an easy problem, is able to
see for himself that, whatever the right answer may be, the answer
given is and must be wrong. So fatal to the development of the
arithmetical sense is the current worship of the rule for its own
sake, and so deadly a narcotic is the conventional arithmetic lesson
to all who take part in it!

It is not in the arithmetic lesson, then, that provision is
ordinarily made for the development of a sense, or perceptive
faculty, through the medium of self-expression on the part of the
child. On the contrary, the very _raison d'etre_ of the arithmetic
lesson, as it is still given in many schools, is to destroy the
arithmetical sense, and make the child an inefficient calculating
machine, which, even when working, is too often inaccurate and
clumsy, and which the slightest change of environment throws at
once and completely out of gear.

After the arithmetical lesson come, as a rule, lessons in "_Reading_"
and "_Writing_"--in reading in some classes, in writing in others.
The first thing that strikes the visitor who enters an ordinary
elementary school while a reading lesson is in progress, is that the
children are not reading at all, in the accepted sense of the word.
They are not reading to themselves, not studying, not mastering the
contents of the book, not assimilating the mental and spiritual
nutriment that it may be supposed to contain. They are standing up,
one by one, even in the highest class of all, and reading aloud to
their teacher.

Why are they doing this? Is it in order that their teacher may show
them how to master the more difficult words in their reading lesson?
This may be the reason, in some schools; but there are others,
perhaps a majority, in which the teacher tells his pupils the words
that puzzle them instead of helping them to make them out for
themselves. Besides, if reading were properly taught in the lower
classes, the children in the upper classes would surely be able to
master unaided the difficulties that might confront them.

Or is it in order that elocution may be cultivated? But elocution is
seldom, if ever, cultivated in the ordinary elementary school, the
veriest mumbling on the part of the child being accepted by his
teacher (who follows him with an open book in his hand), provided
that he can read correctly and with some attempt at "phrasing."
Indeed, the indistinct utterance of so many school childr