Educational Reform in England.—Education, writes James Payn in the Independent, has for a long time, as regards the upper classes, been in the hands of impostors and coxcombs. Scotch schools for ten pounds a year have for generations turned out better educated men than in our public schools for two hundred pounds, and of late the school boards have shown how efficiency can be combined with low prices. This last development has put the great educational establishments upon their mettle, and induced them to consider whether a smattering of Greek obtained in twenty years, and forgotten in the twenty-first, is, after all, the highest form of intellectual culture. The head-masters of Harrow, Winchester and Marlbro’ have come at last to the sage conclusion that twelve years of age is quite early enough to begin Greek, and that for a good many boys that tongue is a superfluity. The simple truth is that not one boy in ten understands Greek. Unhappily this act of tardy justice (and mercy) can have no retrospective effect. Think of the generations of unhappy children who have been tortured by that infernal language, and of the imprisonment in summer days of which it has been the cause. Who can give us back our lost time and liberties infringed? I don’t wish to revive ancient customs of a vindictive nature, but I should like to see the Greek grammar burnt by the common hangman in every school yard. Payn’s indignant language might be reinforced by quoting De Quincey’s description of the second Lord Shaftesbury, a man whose intellect was developed by classical studies alone, and who was practised daily in talking in Latin until he became “the most absolute and undistinguishing pedant that perhaps literature has to show. No thought, however beautiful, no image, however magnificent, could conciliate his praise as long as it was clothed in English, but present him with the most trivial commonplaces in Greek, and he unaffectedly fancied them divine.” Hence he ridiculed Milton, Dryden, Locke, and Shakespeare. How much time and money have been spent in colleges to produce this pedantic perversion of the mind, to create that love of the ignorance of antiquity and indifference to modern enlightenment which are so common among the college-educated classes. Dead Languages Vanishing.—In the eighty higher grammar schools in Germany which are entitled to grant certificates of the proficiency requisite in order that military service may be reduced Higher Education of Women.—Women in Russia have for the last twenty-three years been permitted to obtain university degrees, and now they are permitted to enter the medical profession. Sweden and Norway have followed the example, so has Italy and even Portugal. De Castro, the Portuguese prime minister, says that the improvement of female education is the most urgent question of the day. In France, Mad. Kergomard has been elected a member of the Superior Council of Public Instruction by a large majority. In the London University this year, there were 340 successful candidates, sixty-one of whom were ladies. They were rather more successful than the men in gaining honors. Emily S. Bouton says, “In England a society has been formed of young women, some of them belonging to families of wealth and distinction. Each member binds herself upon entering to learn some one thing, whether art, profession or trade, so thoroughly, that if misfortune comes she will be able to maintain herself by its exercise. It is the beginning of a realization by women themselves, that for any work that demands wages, there must be, not a superficial knowledge which is sure to fail when the test is applied, but a training that will give the mastery of all the faculties, and enable the worker to labor to a definite purpose.” Bad Sunday-School Books.—An Eastern correspondent of the St. Louis Globe has been talking with a Sunday-school superintendent about the bad books in the Sunday-school library, as follows:
For spelling is easy, although We may not always knough How to spell sough. The attempt to form the past tense of verbs by analogy produces this amusing result from the pen of H. C. Dodge. The teacher a lesson he taught; The preacher a lesson he praught; The stealer, he stole; The healer, he hole; And the screecher, he awfully scraught. The long-winded speaker, he spoke; The poor office seeker, he soke; The runner, he ran; The dunner, he dan; And the shrieker, he horribly shroke. The flyer to Canada flew; The buyer, on credit he bew; The doer, he did; The suer, he sid; And the liar (a fisherman) lew. The writer, this nonsense he wrote; The fighter (an editor) fote; The swimmer, he swam; The skimmer, he skam; And the biter was hungry and bote. |