Reform In Primary Education Classic Reprint

Author : Adolf Sonnenschein
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781330501238
Total Pages : 46 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (12 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Truth about Elementary Education written by Adolf Sonnenschein and published by . This book was released on 2015-06-30 with total page 46 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Truth About Elementary Education: With Suggestions for Affecting the Most Needful Reforms On Cram and Overpressure. - It is necessary to explain to the uninitiated that cram and overpressure, though often seen together, are far from identical. Cram, technically known as the "short cut," the "straight tip," is well described by George Eliot in these words: "In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts, which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness." This starch might with more appositeness have been designated manufacturer's size, by which the dishonest trader is enabled to palm off on an unsuspecting public flimsy calico for good longcloth, or even linen. To make this clear, we must state the difference between the crammer or "coach," and the teacher. The good teacher is wisely discursive; he aims at giving to his pupils a rich and varied association of ideas, and a large connotation to the terms in use. He follows tho growth of notions in the minds of his pupils, and by no means the sequence of ideas exacted by the examination schedules. The coach knows nothing of all that; with a single eye he drives straight for the examination, and however instructive, formative, or tempting any digression might be, he resolutely ignores it, because it "does not pay." His system is a nicely arranged course of mnemonics - the facts are carefully pigeon-holed, ready for production at examinations. Again, the teacher, and above all the trainer of the intelligence, cultivates the analytic memory, or, as Stow expresses it, "the memory of ideas before the memory of words"; the coach only cares for the merely portative, the temporarily portative memory. The former process is laborious to the teacher, but highly profitable to the pupil; the latter is "expeditious" and valueless. The teacher, through a fine cultivation of the intelligence, influences the emotions and aspirations; the coach cannot be said to cultivate even the memory; he only crowds it. Of the value of such a memory let quaint Thomas Fuller speak; he is no mean judge, having himself been possessed of a memory almost portentous, and yet he says: "Artificial memory is rather a trick than an art, and more for the gain of the teacher than profit of the learners." Your man with a thickly-stocked memory, having a large assortment of dogmas, maxims, and apophthegms ready for all occasions, is, at best, but a silly Polonius, hurtful to everybody, and mostly so to himself; he tries, poor idiot! to reason with his memory; he might as well try to see with his nose. True, Polonius was an extreme case of a crammed man, but more or less everybody is vitally injured by cram, both physically and intellectually; and it begets a distaste for learning, which demoralizes the student's whole nature. Overwork, however, means too much and too assiduous labour. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.