ARE LESSONS MADE TOO EAST.

Te Aroha News, Volume XXVI, Issue 43108, 22 June 1907, Page 4

ARE LESSONS MADE TOO EAST.

Professor iMbCallum, in the course of an address before the Society for Child Study at Sydney last week, said it seemed to him that teachers were liable to three dangers—-those of making lessors too easy, making them' top pleasant, and making them too intellisant, and making them: too intelligible. Ini the last-named connection, lie referred to the teaching of English grammar, which was conducted on absolutely false principles devised centuries ago for the Greek language. We asked- children, he said, to exert their 'intellects oni a somewhat ab- j stralct subject, yet this very hardship] was an advantage. He remembered i how, when he was young, he was) brought up on ‘*tlbat excellent if not i quite up-to-date book, the Shorter i Catechism.” Every Monday morning the class was expected to give definitions of things like justification by faith, and so forth, some of which had been puzzling the minds of men for centuries. He did not pretend that schoolboys made any very successful attempts at such question®, but he did think, that when the subjects were properly presented to them, they got some inkling of the problems, of the great issues involved. In tackling them, the Scotch schoolboy got into the way of exercising, his intellect in logical fashion.