e primary pupils receive but little attention, and they
are not infrequently occupied from one to three years in obtaining an
imperfect knowledge of the alphabet. Usually much better results are
attained by the combined agency of the home and the school, but there is
an average loss of one-fourth of the time employed in teaching and
learning the elements of our language.

Mr. Philbrick, Superintendent of Public Schools in Boston, has taught
and trained a class of fifty primary-school pupils with a degree of
success which fully sustains the statement of the average waste in
schools generally. Twenty-two lessons of a half-hour each were given;
and in this brief period of time the class, with a few exceptions, were
so well advanced that they could write the alphabet in capital and
script hand, give the elementary sounds of the letters, produce and name
the Arabic characters and the common geometrical figures found upon
Holbrook's slates. I saw a girl, five and a half years of age, write the
alphabet without delay in script hand, in a manner that would have been
creditable to a pupil in a grammar school.

I present Mr. Philbrick's own account of his mode of proceeding, in an
extract from his third quarterly report to the school committee of the
city of Boston.

"The regulations relating to the primary schools require every scholar
to be provided with a slate, and to employ the time not otherwise
occupied in drawing or writing words from their spelling lessons, on
their slates, in a plain script hand. It is further stated, in the same
connection, that the teachers are expected to take special pains to
teach the first class to write--not print--all the letters of the
alphabet on slates.

"The language of this requirement seems to imply that the classes below
the first are to draw and write words, in a plain script hand, without
any special pains to teach them, and that by such occupation they were
to be kept from idleness. As I saw neither of these objects
accomplished in any primary school, I thought it worth while to satisfy
myself, by actual experiment, what can and ought to be done, in the use
of the slate and blackboard, in teaching writing and drawing in primary
schools. To accomplish this object, I have given a course of lessons in
a graded or classified school of the third class. The number of pupils
instructed in the class was about fifty. The materials of the school are
rather below the average; about twenty of