BRAINS.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 459, 2 April 1890, Page 6

BRAINS.

How to Snow that Ciibloren Have Them* Rev. Petek Prescott has written a veryvaluable and instructive booklet, which is; published by Fisher Unwin, on the reform in education, by which children are taught; to be children of sense instead of repeating dolls. He gives his own methods, and a few instances of their necessity : Take the following illustrative facts into consideration : 1. It is well known that men may carry off the very highest University honours, and be worth very little afterwards. The brain has become like a bow that has been strained and made useless to the archer. 2. A few years ago a Master of Arts said to me, ‘ When my sister was sixteen, shewas as bright and bonny a girl as you would wish to see. But she went in for those examinations, and she has never been; Worth Sixpence Since.” 3. When I was in Cornwall I was acquainted with a girl of 14 and her widowed mother. The girl was the heiress of £20,000, and the father, for reasons of his own, had placed her education under the direction of trustees. She was to have a governess, and be taught without any companions in a solitary farmhouse in which; her mother lived ; not a very wise arrangement. The girl was drilled in her studies from Monday morning to Saturday nighfa almost without intermission, nor was Sunday altogether free from study. The governess did what, in her simplicity, she thought was best for the girl’s improvement and her own reputation. She thought that the harder she hammered the faster her pupil would learn —a prejudice that Is Not Yet Exploded. It turned out otherwise; all 8 hammering and teaching caused the pupil t-o become oppressed as with an irremovable load of dulness. In the good providence o£ God, it came to pass that the governess left, and for some time another could not be obtained. I told her mothor that this was the very best thing that could possibly have . happened, and that all that her daughter needed for six months at leash was a skipping rope. With the aid of the skipping rope, the change wrought in her was marvellous. She shot up in statnre surprisingly, just as if heavy load preventing her growth had oeen lifted off her brain ; her health and spirits returned, and she had abundant cause to believe in the virtue that resides in the judicious use of a skipping rope.