EDUCATIONAL.

Westport Times, Volume VIII, Issue 1160, 20 March 1874, Page 2

EDUCATIONAL.

A novel, and what promises to be a highly beneficial step, is being taken by the Board of Education of the city and county of San Francisco. It has caused a Bill to be drafted and introduced into the State Legislature authorising the establishment of a system of mechanical labour in connection with the common schools of that city and county. By the terms of the proposed enactment, the Board of Education will be empowered to provide as soon as practicable, suitable rooms. or buildings, either within or contiguous to such of the public school houses as they may designate, to furnish the necessary stock, materials, and machinery for carrying on the several trades which it may be considered desirable to introduce: and to engage and determine the remuneration to he paid to the several instructors who are to be employed in the mechanical depart, ments of the schools. The Board of Education will also desiguate the kind of occupations to be acquired and pursued; the bill merely declaring that the branches of mechanical labor which shall first be taught in connection with the common schools, both male and female, shall be those that require small capital and small space, and the prosecution of which will not be attended with much noise. The cost of giving effect to these provisions is to be defrayed out of the school fund of the city and county of San Francisco. Experience will probably show that this kind of instruction will bo even more valuable than the usual sequence of primary education; for, after a girl or boy has mastered the " three It's;" what follows is too often a mere cultivation of the memory,— the loading it with facts and dates wearisome in the acquisition and worthless in the possession. But to teach a pupil how to use his hands, and how to exercise his powers of observation, comparison, calculation, and reflection, while engaged in an occupation which interests him now, and will qualify him to gain his livelihood hereafter, is to confer upon him a very great boon indeed. The greatest thinkers of our own time are coming round to the conviction of the ancients, that education is something more than mere book learning. As Mr Herbert Spencer admirably puts it:—"This faith in lesson books and readings is one of the superstitions of the ago. Even as appliances to intellectual culture, books are greatly over-eatimated. Somcthiug gathered from printed pages is supposed to enter into a course of education ; but, if gathered by observation of life and nature, is supposed not thus to enter. Reading is seeing by proxy—is learning indirectly through another man's faculties, instead of through ones own faculties ; and such is tho prevailing bias, that tho indirect learning is thought preferable to the direct learning."