after
going to school a while, lose all their thirst after knowledge and
their inquisitiveness.

What is the cause of this regrettable transformation in the childish
mind?

I have inquired, and here is what I have discovered.

When a lad goes to school, he first learns to read and write. Having
mastered the alphabet, he is instructed in the art of reading,
_i.e._, the compounding of literal sounds to form words. Immediately,
from the first step, no matter whether he be English or French, he
begins to learn that most frequently letters lose their alphabetical
value when they are united with others. He finds out that everything
is almost entirely arbitrary and devoid of rule; and when a French
pupil asks why A and U together give the sound of O, the unfortunate
teacher can but reply with the famous phrase, which the child will
hear so often during his life: _It is so, because it is so._

After this initial illogical dogmatic exercise, the child starts
learning grammar and arithmetic.

Alas! here again the fine _explanation_: _It is so ..._ continues to
be in vogue.

In grammar, with every rule, he finds one, two, three, innumerable
exceptions. Hence the rule is soon drowned under a flood of
exceptions. We Frenchmen have actually founded a proverb: _There is
no rule without an exception._ True it is that all these exceptions
have historical reasons, but these reasons can only be appreciated
when one knows many ancient and modern languages. That study is
philology, and philology is not a science to be understood by
children!

The study of arithmetic might be a more logical exercise, but of all
departments of mathematics, arithmetic is in theory the most
abstruse. While algebraical reasoning is most frequently analytical,
arithmetical reasoning is generally synthetical, and, consequently,
more difficult to understand.

As a result of the great difficulty of arithmetical theories, the
teacher is, willy-nilly, commonly compelled to make the lad learn
results by heart without any explanation, and the young pupil adopts
parrot-method, which he takes as models to be followed, but not to be
verified. To these are added lessons from prose and poetical extracts
also to be learned by rote, and, above all, Roman and Greek history
is taught, which is quite unintelligible on account of the great
diversity between ancient and modern customs.

In fine, our children can only come to one conclusion: Everything in
human ken is