be taught as "class subjects," even
if this should involve the "Sixth" and "Seventh Standards" being
brigaded with, and kept down for one or even two years to, the level
of the "Fifth,"--kept down, it would seem, for no other purpose than
that of being the passive recipients of the teacher's windy "talk,"
and the helpless witnesses of his futile "chalk," and of having their
own activities paralysed and their own powers of expression starved
into inanition.

I will deal with one more "secular" subject before I bring this
sketch to a close. There are still many schools in which the hours
that are set apart for _Drawing_ are devoted in large measure to the
slavish reproduction of flat copies. A picture of some familiar
object--outlined, shaded, or tinted as the case may be, and not
infrequently highly conventionalised--hangs in front of the class;
and the children copy it, stroke by stroke, and curve by curve, and
put in the shading and lay on washes of colour. As long practice at
work of this kind develops a certain degree of manual dexterity, and
as the free use of india-rubber is permitted and even encouraged, the
child's finished work may be so neat and accurate as to become worthy
of a place on the school wall. But what is the value, what is the
meaning of work of this kind? When such a drawing lesson as I have
described is in progress, the divorce between perception and
expression is complete. And as each of these master faculties is the
very life and soul of the other, their complete divorce from one
another involves the complete eclipse of each. The child who copies
a flat copy does not perceive anything except some other person's
reproduction of a scene or object; and even this he does not
necessarily grasp as a whole, his business being to reproduce it with
flawless accuracy, line by line. Indeed, it may well happen that he
does not even know what the picture or diagram before him is intended
to represent. Nor is he expressing anything, for he has not made his
model in any sense or degree his own. Thus, during the whole of a
lesson in which the perceptive and expressive faculties are supposed
to be receiving a special training, they are lying dormant and inert.
Each of them is, for the time being, as good as dead. And each of
them will assuredly die if this kind of teaching goes on for very
long, die for lack of exercise, die wasted and atrophied by disuse.
The extent to which the copying of copies can injure a