leaving, can have scarcely more than a confused idea of what they are supposed to be proficient in. At given times they have been served with a given quantity of mental nourishment, but, as those seated at table are not always able to partake of the same food in the same quantities at stated periods, so pupils, however endowed by nature, can not always digest new ideas nor investigate new subjects with equal readiness.
The theory of instruction is based upon natural inclination. A child visiting the circus, menagerie, museum, or theatre, is all eyes, all ears. Question it upon its return home, and you will, doubtless, be surprised at the amount and variety of its information. It has seen and heard that which you have failed to see and hear.
It is this faculty of the child of absorbing itself in what pleases or interests it that has been seized upon by the managers. In the public school, the young, restless with the impatience of childhood, are forced to remain quiet while attempts are made to describe to them a something which they have never seen, and, not being based upon anything in which their interests have previously been excited, leaves, at best, but little impression on their minds. When it has begun to dawn upon them that Columbus was a man and not a fish, and that he came hither in a sailing-vessel and not in a steamship; when they are a-hunger and a-thirst for information as to his reasons for believing there was a New World in the West, the bell rings and they are ushered into the awful presence of an arithmetician, who knows all about the denomination of numbers, circulating decimals, and the like, and who, having memorized all the rules, thinks everybody else should be compelled to do the same. This system of opposing the natural inclinations of the young is, perhaps, best expressed in the retort of the lad to his mother when she told him to go to bed early in the evening: "You make me go to bed when I'm not sleepy, and get up when I am!"
An inclination of the visitor to the Workingman's School, as he looks over the heads of the children at work, is to compare their lot to his own when a boy. Unless he was unusually gifted, he will recall the tedious hours he spent while trying to memorize the rules in his grammar—rules which he didn't always understand—the struggle with the coefficients of the nth. power of binominals, and so on. He will remember with what reluctance he sometimes entered the school-gates and with what satisfaction he often closed them behind him. Holidays were marked with a red letter in his diary, and vacations not infrequently looked upon as the condemned are wont to look upon temporary respites. But now, as he looks about him, he sees children absolutely interested in their studies and their work. And such work!—molding with moist clay, cutting, sawing, and planing with real tools, fashioning artistic designs, and so on.
The youngsters of his day often absented themselves from school, and stolidly took the punishment which such dereliction entailed, in
