School-books and Manuals.

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and then jot down a characteristic phrase, a heading or some hint as to the order of the thought; and then, on getting home revolve the whole matter in your mind, and write down in your own words an orderly summary of your recollections, there will be a genuine acquisition. You will be sure that some at least of what you have tried to learn has been actually assimilated. And I would counsel the adoption of the same rule in permitting your scholars the practice of note-taking. Teach them how to use note-books. Do not let them suppose that the reproduction of your phrases is of any use. Do not mistake means for ends. It is a chemical not a mechanical combination you want. It is the writing out of memoranda after the lecture which serves this purpose and is of real intellectual value; not the notes taken during the lecture itself. And of these notes you have no assurance that they have served any good purpose unless they are ultimately translated out of your phraseology into the student's own language.

On the larger subject of School-books and Manuals Text-books. much might be said. But it would obviously be beside the main purpose of these lectures if I were to take upon myself to recommend particular books; and so possibly to do injustice to the authors and publishers of many excellent books which I have never seen. The truth is that goodness and fitness in a school-book are not absolute but relative terms. They depend entirely on the person who uses it. That book is the best for each teacher which he feels he can use best, and which suits best his own method and ideal of work. Even if the best conceivable criticism could be brought to bear on all the innumerable manuals now in use, and they could be arranged in the order of abstract merit, such criticism might not help you much. There would

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still remain for each of you the responsibility of making your own choice. Indeed some of the best and most vigorous teaching I have ever heard has been given by teachers who were consciously using a very bad book, and who were goaded by it into remonstrance and criticism, which were in themselves very instructive and stimulating to the learner. I remember well my own teacher of mathematics, Professor De Morgan, and his animated polemic against Dilworth and Walkinghame, and especially poor Robert Simson's edition of Euclid. His anger, his pitiless sarcasm, as he denounced the dulness of these writers and exposed the crudeness of their mathematical conceptions, were in themselves well calculated to sharpen the perceptions of his students. The bad book in the hands of a skilful teacher proved to be better than the best book in the hands of an ordinary practitioner. I am not, however, prepared to recommend the use of bad books as a general expedient. But it cannot be too clearly understood that the right choice of a book depends entirely on the use you mean to make of it.

If you are, as every teacher ought to be, fluent and skilful in oral exposition, you will need very little of the sort of explanation which school-books contain; your chief want will be supplied by books of well-graduated exercises, by which your oral teaching may be supplemented, fixed, thrust home, and brought to a point. But if, on the other hand, you want explanations, rules, and a knowledge of principles, mere books of exercises will not suffice. You need the treatises more or less full,—say of grammar, of arithmetic, of geography -and I will not promise that when you have got the best of them, your pupils will be able to make progress with their help alone. The best explanations in school

Tests of a good School-book.

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books are concise, and therefore generally inadequate. They need expansion and much comment. The Educational Reading Room at South Kensington is a great resource. In it you will always find very easy of access all the newest and best school-books; which you can sit down and examine, and from which it is not difficult to determine what form of manual will suit your purpose best.

Some of the tests by which the goodness of a school- Some tests of a good book may be determined are not however difficult to schoollay down. Take a Reading-book for example. You have book. here to secure:-that it is well-printed and attractive, that it is not silly and too childish, that the passages selected are not too short and scrappy, but continuous enough to be of some value in sustaining thought, and that every lesson contains a few-a very few-new words which are distinct additions to the reader's vocabulary. Above all it concerns you to be much more anxious about the style than about the amount of information which is packed into the book. So also of a book of History or Science, I should not choose that which comprised in it greatest mass of facts, but that which was best written and most likely to encourage the student to desire a larger and fuller book. As to French, Latin and English Grammars, to books on Arithmetic and Geography, it concerns us much more to secure a good logical arrangement of rules; proper distinction of type between important and unimportant facts, between typical rules and exceptional rules; with good searching and well-arranged exercises, than anything else. One good test of a Grammar or delectus or of a manual of any kind is this: Does it, as soon as it has helped the student to know something, instantly set him to do something which requires him to use that knowledge, and to shew that he

Libraries.

has really acquired it? E.g. If it explains a new term, does it require the learner soon to use that term? If it states a rule, does it give him instantly occasion to put the rule in practice? If it points out a new logical or grammatical distinction, does it challenge him forthwith to find new instances and illustrations of that distinction? These seem to me to be the chief purposes which a book can serve to supplement oral teaching, not to furnish an excuse for dispensing with it. I suppose the task of making compendiums, and trying to reduce the essence of a good many books into a cheap school manual is a depressing one. At all events school-books must, I fear, as a rule be placed in the category-let us say-of uninspired writings. Their authors often evince a great want of imagination and a curious incapacity to discriminate between the significant and insignificant, between the little and the great. That is precisely the deficiency which a good teacher has to supply, and it can only be supplied by vigorous oral teaching.

The usefulness and need of School Libraries depend very much on the character of the school. In every Boarding School they are indispensable; as children have leisure to be filled and tastes to be formed, and a life to live which is not wholly that of the school. But even in Day Schools, there is great need for such adjuncts to the materials for instruction, and this need is becoming more and more recognised. Until a good library is attached as a matter of course to every one of our elementary schools, a great opportunity of refining the taste and enlarging the knowledge of the young will continue to be wasted, and the full usefulness of those institutions will remain unattained. After all, it is the main business of a primary school, and indeed a chief part of the business of every school, to awaken a

love of reading, and to give children pleasant associations with the thought of books. When once a strong appetite for reading has been excited the mere money difficulty of providing the library in a school for the poor is already half overcome. For subscriptions from children and their parents, gifts from kindly friends, are obtainable without much difficulty, whenever a teacher makes up his mind that the object is worth attaining, and casts about in earnest for the means of attaining it.

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Now granting that you have to form a school library, How to or that your advice is asked by those who desire to them. purchase or give one, what sort of books will you select? That is a question worth thinking about. In the first place, you will get books of reference, good manuals, such as you need for amplifying a school lesson. You constantly have to say in teaching: 'There is a fuller account of this incident in such a book.' 'There are some anecdotes about this animal, or a poem descriptive of this place, by such a writer.' Or 'I should like you to read up the life of this eminent man before we have our next lesson.' And for purposes like these it is of great importance to have the best books of reference -books fuller and larger than mere school-books— within reach. This remark applies to all schools alike. But besides this, it adds to the value of a child's schoollife, if something can be done by it to direct his reading and to teach him how to fill his leisure profitably. In a secondary day-school, to which pupils come from orderly and intelligent homes, this particular purpose is of less importance than elsewhere, because it may be presumed that educated parents will look after the leisure reading of their children. It is in schools for the poor, and in all boarding-schools, that a general library is most needed.