ON TEACHING CHILDREN.

Temuka Leader, Issue 2013, 27 February 1890, Page 2

ON TEACHING CHILDREN.

Information given orally is much better remembered than what is read —of this we have abundant proof rrom all sides; and, when books are used, there is always the danger of getting into the abstract before the concrete. For instance, the ordinary method of teaching foreign languages is to make the child learn dry grammatical rules, then write exercises on them, translate, &c.; but not till after years of study, if then, is the facility of speaking the language acquired. Now, the true method is to pass from the contract to the abstract. At about five years old—that is, some three years before reading - lessons should commence—the child may be taught short pieces of poetry in the foreign tongues, word for word with the translation, so that it shall thoroughly understand what it says. It may be accustomed to ask for what it wants in the language taught, and thus it will acquire the habit of speakm.S l he laD 8 ua ge, while its memory will be strengthened, and it will find the mode of instruction pleasant: for instead of the tedium, so irksome to an active child, of being- obliged to sit up at a table and learn from books it is in reality not conscious of haying* ■-

lessons at all. It may learn while it is out of doors, when at its meals, even when at play; and everything that a child should learn can and °ught to he taught in the same way. Then, when at last it learns to read, it finds the knowledge it has already gained supplemented by books, and instead of learning from them in a dull, parrot-like way, it uses them as they should be used, as a means of arranging facts and setting in order knowledge which it has already acquired, or may acquire, by personal experience or investigation, and of supplying knowledge not easily to be obtained elsewhere. As that quaint old philosopher, Sir Thomas Browne, has said: “They do most by books who would do much without them.”— “ Early Education,” by Ada S, Ballin, in Baby.