The Portland daily press., 1876-03-07

Proper Mode of Instruction in Our Com
mon Schools.
The following practical exposition of good
system of instruction for American youth is
from the annual report of the School Commit
tee written by Rev. DR.. Hill. He says:
The primary object of public education
is to fit the pupils for the duties of citizen
ship; to lead them to become useful men,
bers of the republic. The first thing then
to be taught is good morals; that is ODE
dience to lawful authority, purity, honesty,
truthfulness, kindness, industry. But this
necessarily involves the cultivation of that
reverence for sacred things, that recogni-
ton of the supremacy of duty, that awe of
the sanctions of the moral law, which is
the only foundation and basis for morals.
1t also involves the cultivation of gentle
and courteous manners which are the ex-
preston and safeguard of virtuous inter-
i ests. Our parent commonwealth makes it
incumbent upon her school teachers to
| give their first attention to good manners
and morality; nor can we hold our teach
ers to any other standard.
The second thing to be taught in the
public schools is the use of the English
language. Language is not only the eX-
preston of thought, it is the instrument of
thinking. Some of the wisest of the Jap
anese and Chinese are complaining that
their countrymen have been held back
from progress by the faulty form of their
language; and they have even proposed in
Japan to adopt the English language, in
order that the young Japanese may learn
to think and Japan rise to an equality with
European nations. The harvests of Hi
nois and California could not be gathered
with sickles; the problems of modern
physical science could not be handled with
, the algebra of Descartes. Nor can our
children intelligently decide upon the great
questions of modern social, political,
economic, scientific and religious life; they
cannot intelligently vote for members of
I Congress, and presidential electors, if they
! have no other tools and instruments of
Z thinking than the colloquial language of
their ordinary associates. The citizens of
a republic must be familiar with the Ian
guage in its literary and philosophic modes.
Our children must be taught the use of the
English language in its best models, until
they can read it and write it as readily,
with as little conscious effort, as they speak
it in its collOquial form; then they will be
able to follow arguments upon public ques-
tons, and give intelligent decisions.
The third thing to be acquired in the
public schools is perfect familiarity with
those simplest mathematical processes
which are in use in every day life; the Or
binary methods of keeping accounts and
taking measurements, without which no
business of any kind can be conducted,
public or private.
These are the three essentials in the pub
lie schools; first sound morals, secondly
good English, thirdly elementary mathe-
mates. The school which teaches these
well and thoroughly gives good common
| school education; the school which fails in
either of the three makes vital failure.
| The child who has thoroughly learned
/ these will, since good morals include habits
of industry, acquire of its own accord all
the further education which its abilities
and its opportunities allow. 1t is for the
best interests of the city, and the State,
that opportunities for further education be
afforded,-as they are afforded in the high
chool,-but the essential thing for the
safety of the whole community is that all
the children be carefully grounded in these
! great elements of culture; which must be
secured in the primary schools, even if at
! the sacrifice of all other things. More
over, these three things are to be learned
practically before they are learned theoret-
ically; acquired as arts, even if not mas
tered as sciences; to be fixed as habits of
action, not as lumber in the memory or
theorems in the understanding. This is
felt by all judicious persons to be the case
| in morals; it is maintained by all the most
| distinguished writers on education to be
equally true in language and mathematics.
Now in learning an art, or acquiring a
| habit, it is universally conceded that eX-
ample teaches more than precept. The
example of the teacher and the effort of
| pupil to copy are the prime factors which
alone can give the product of proficiency
in an art. The morals of the teacher are
accidentally betrayed to the pupils, and
Immediately affect their morals. A teacher
scrupuously neat has little need of con-
scious effort to make the scholars neat; a
slOvenly teacher will in vain endeavor to
correct slovenly habits in his school; and
so with other virtues and vices. A teacher
| taking sly advantages at simultaneous
examination, to give her school a fairer
| appearance than others, does an incalcula-
BILE wrong to the moral honesty of her
| scholars.
| But all this is true also in the arts of
reading, writing, and ciphering. Mr.. Shay
| lor's great success in teaching penmanship
| comes from his leading his children to an
intelligent following of good copies. Dur
| ing the past year we have increased
| the amount of practice in writing in
| the primary schools, and the result is
| highly gratifying. The first classes in the
! primary schools have improved more in the
! past six months than they would have
| done in two years under the former rules.
The same method applied to the teaching
of reading and ciphering will, we are con-
! fident, soon show similar results. In the
school-rooms of the United States, so far
as the observation of your committee goes,
the teacher is prone to depend more upon
! the barbarous jargon of rules in elocution.
than upon ''setting copies" by frequently
reading aloud for the pupils to initiate !;
more upon the child's memory of columns
of words in spelling books, than upon his
memory of the words as they appear in an
! oft-read selection. The pupils conse-
I quently fail to learn to read well, simply
because they have no good reading to
/ copy from; they fail to learn to spell SIM
, ply because they do not read enough to
make the appearance of words familiar to
them. In reading books more than in any
other textbooks there is a great advantage
in the plan adopted in our neighboring
city of Lewiston, of having the textbooks
owned by the city and lent to the pupils
while using them. Besides the advantages
of economy, and of teaching children
habits of neatness and fidelity in handling
applied to reading books gives the child
the opportunity Of having much greater
range of reading, and acquiring a much
greater facility in using the English
language, the great instrument of thought,
the key to the treasures of wisdom and
knowledge.
AS a help in learning to read, the COM
mittee have added to the apparatus of the
primary schools of Portland, primers and
charts printed in DR.. Leigh's pronouncing
| alphabet, which has given good results in
Boston, st. Louis, and other cities. and
is beginning, we think, to do so here. 1t
! is not equal as means of facilitating the
child's labor, to the Cincinnati Phonotype,
but it has the advantage of not exciting so
much prejudice at first sight, among the
| parents. Careful experiments upon large
| numbers Of children show that DR.. Leigh's
| type saves six months of labor to the
pupil, the Cincinnati type more than
twelve months. The greatest drawback
to the usefulness of our English tongue as
means of ciyilizing and elevating our
own people, and especially the immigrants
(and their descendants) from other
countries than England lies in the capri