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The Art of Education
143

synthesis (or so-called historical method), of which he exhibits samples, is a very good thing in its way, failing anything better. But the specialist teacher, even if he knows this method, can only use it within the limits of his own subject; and it must be, at best, utterly inadequate to compensate the strain of modern education and restore the needed amount of energy. No one was better aware of this than the Author himself. Nothing is really adequate, except a periodic synthesis class, in which a synthesis of all the week's work is made by the pupils themselves, under the guidance of a competent Logician. And it is essential to full success that no subject which has been forced on the attention of the pupils by any specialist teacher whatsoever shall be forbidden ground at the Logos-class. I use the word " Logos " in preference to Logic, because the latter term has been taken to imply a special kind of study. Logos is the old word for the thing of which I am speaking, the Logic of the Logan-stone; the blessed antithesis to those fixed stones of evil magic and arrested progress which show the consequence of not keeping Sabbath.

The much vilipended Examination-system has the great advantage of preventing the possibility of carrying out the plan of any Idealist as conceived by him. It forces us, therefore, if we would learn anything from the ideal purists, to understand thoroughly those principles of sanitation from which their plans are projected; so as to be able to create our plans for ourselves according to circumstances. Strange as it may sound, I venture to prophesy that the Examiner will prove, in the long run, the best friend of Idealism in Education,