Success...... Honour Courses.. Examinations. Gazette, Notices.... Injudicious Punishments........ 45, 107, 135, 194, 281, 347 230 Literature, Historical Notes, etc... 21, 94, 123, 159, 223, 303 Moral Drill in School..... 291 EXCELSIOR SCHOOL MAPS (the best published), GLOBES, CHARTS, DICTIONARIES, ETC., AND GENERAL SCHOOL SUPPLIES. F. E. GRAFTON & SONS, Publishers, Booksellers and Stationers, 250, ST. JAMES STREET, MONTREAL. LISTS ON APPLICATION. PATENTS CAVEATS, TRADE MARKS, CAN I OBTAIN A PATENT? For a Patents taken through Munn & Co. receive special notice in the Scientific American, and thus are brought widely before the public without cost to the inventor. This splendid paper, issued weekly, elegantly illustrated, has by far the largest circulation of any scientific work in the world. $3 a year. Sample copies sent free. Building Edition, monthly. $2 50 a year. Single eopies, 25 cents. Every number contains beautiful plates, in colors, and photographs of new houses, with plans, enabling builders to show the latest designs and secure contracts. Address MUNN & CO., NEW YORK, 361 BROADWAY. BY A. G. CROSs, B.A., B.C.L., ADVOCATE, MONTREAL. (Continued.) The first point at which legitimate criticism may take exception to existing methods appears to be the undue predominance accorded to text-books and fixed subjects of study. Pupils acquire the mistaken notion that all that they are to learn is to be gotten out of some book, and almost any sort of an interrogation at once sends them upon the enquiry as to what is said about it in the text-book. We have become a reading people, so much so that the practice of conversation has largely gone into disuse. There seems to be almost nothing of sustained conversation in family circles. A relic of the practice seems here and there to survive in the evening meeting at the village shop-keeper's store, which may deserve to be perpetuated as a source of possible intellectual stimulus. In our elementary schools, however, attempts at having the pupils try to give expression, in the reciprocal way presupposed in conversation, to Second part of a paper read before the Teachers' Convention held in Sherbrooke in October, 1895. The first part appeared in the December number of the RECORD. HARVARD COLLEGE LIBRARY ideas formed at the moment of utterance and not in language copied from text-books, are practically unknown. Faculties disused do not improve but rather shrink; and the pupils in our schools, unlike politicians and frequenters of evening parties, cannot speak when they have nothing to say. In this way, paradoxical as it may seem, the very vehicles of instruction, printed books, become an obstacle to education in language. When it has been my fortune to witness class exercises on a few occasions, I have heard a high school teacher shout questions at a class very much in the style of an auctioneer or nostrum vendor at a fair, while to each question the reply would come from one or more pupils in the stereotyped language of the text-book. The answers were evidence that there had been a considerable amount of memorizing, but were not evidence of development in originality of conception. A short time ago I asked a class in Canadian History, as a sort of introductory question, how it happened that the people of this Province were in part French speaking people and for the remainder English speaking. The pupils of the class were quite prepared to have answered almost any question the reply to which could be given by reciting one or more sentences from the text-book. Nor were they lacking in the knowledge of facts which would form the answer to the question actually put, but in reality they were unable to answer it, because they were almost wholly without experience in giving expression to an inference from stated facts. They found themselves mentally running through a textbook in search of a few sentences with which to convey a reply, the substance of which was quite within their knowledge and the resultant look of impatient disappointment plainly suggested the wish: "Oh that he would only ask us something out of the book!" I venture humbly to suggest to you that in all such cases the teachers had not acted up to the requirements of the Course of Study in the matter of "conversation with pupils on familiar subjects," "short stories related by the teacher and repeated by the pupils," or "writing sentences about a particular object." The reason why pupils have their intellectual horizon thus bounded by the text-book must be that the teachers themselves do not go outside of the textbook. |