WHICH IS A GOOD SCHOOL?

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to the interests pertaining to reason. But this elevation is not possible except through a constant appeal to the will. The office of the will is not to compel the mind to any line of activity in the absence of interests that would be impossible but of two or more interests before the mind at any moment, to choose between them in harmony with the conclusions of reason.

Which is a Good School? The clear perception of the necessity of motives and of the enormous difference in the educational value of the motives which you may employ, will give you a new test for determining the excellence of a school. You go into a school; the order is excellent, the lessons well prepared. You say, "That's a good school." But can you be sure of that without further examination? You know indeed that good results are reached; but before you can decide as to the character of the school, you must know what means are employed to reach them you must know what motives the teacher appeals to. Are the pupils quiet simply through fear? Then all we can say is that the school has one element of a good school-order- but that the wrong motives are relied on to get it. Do they learn their lessons to avoid punishment? Then again I say the wrong motives are appealed to. Good teaching appeals to motives that will tend to make pupils studious through life. How long will the fear of punishment influence pupils? As long as there is a teacher to inflict punishment. Indeed, as we have

seen, it is not enough to make instruction interesting. Volkman well says that the precept of modern pedagogy is, "Instruct in such a way that an interest may awake and remain active for life."

Emulation. The question as to how far emulation should be appealed to is undoubtedly difficult, but it is safe to say that it is not to be condemned altogether, as some theorists and idealists would have it. Where it is used to stimulate the idle as well as the industrious, the weak as well as the strong, it is an altogether proper and valuable motive to appeal to. In that suggestive and stimulating book, Educational Reformers, the author, Mr. Quick, gives an interesting and instructive illustration of some excellent work which the principle of emulation may be made to do. "Let me tell you," he says in an imaginary conversation with a friend, "of one form of stimulus which seemed to work well and was free from most of the objections you are thinking of. When I had a small school of my own, in which there were only young boys, I put up in the school-room a list of the boys' names, in alphabetical order, with blank spaces after the names. I looked over the boys' written work very carefully, and whenever I came across any written exercise evidently done with great painstaking, and, for that boy, with more than ordinary success, marked it with a G, and I put the G in one of the spaces after that boy's name in the list hung up in the schoolroom. When the school collectively had a fixed number of G's, we had an extra half-holiday. The announcement of a G was therefore always hailed with delight.” — P. 530, Rev. Ed.

This method tended to make the boy emulate his past self, and that was its chief excellence. It was not the merit of a boy's work, in comparison with the work of other boys, that won a G, but the merit in comparison with his own past performances. But I do not mean to

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imply that it is never proper to try to get our pupils to work by inducing them to try to excel each other. Far from it. A boy who feels that he is a blockhead thinks that it is not worth while for him to try to do anything. Each pupil should be made to feel that there is some thing in which he can excel, and we should regard it as one of our most important duties to try to help him to find what that thing is. We should therefore always be on the alert to detect any signs of excellence in the work of the dull boys and girls, and be quick to commend it. I have already spoken of a boy who could not spell one word in four in a spelling lesson after hours of study. But he was excellent in arithmetic, and it was altogether proper for his teacher to praise his work in that subject as highly as it would bear.

QUESTIONS ON THE TEXT.

1. What is the difference between mediate and immediate knowedge?

2. Define intellect, sensibility, and will.

3. Define and give examples of knowing, feeling, and willing.

4. Why are erroneous reasonings classed as knowing?

5. What is meant by the opposition of knowing, feeling, and willing?

6. What is meant by their interdependence?

7. Illustrate both from your own observation and experience.

8. What is the test of a good school?

9. What is one of the most important duties of a teacher?

SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS.

1. Show in detail the relation between the conclusions reached as to the conditions of attention and those reached in this chapter.

2. Can you bring the law of the antagonism between knowing, feeling, and willing under a wider law?

3. Mention ways in which the principle of emulation may be used to get altogether useful results.

4. Give examples of erroneous reasonings in children, and show their resemblance to correct reasonings.

LESSON XVIII.

SENSATION.

In the last lesson we picked out the threads of which the tangled web of our conscious life is composed. We learned that, no matter what subject stands in the centre of the field of consciousness-whether the toys of the child, the games of the boy, the ambitions of the young man, the absorbing occupations of maturity, or the retrospective reveries of old age-our entire mental life consists of knowing, feeling, and willing.

If my object were to discuss, even in a superficial way, these various phases of our mental life, it would be proper now to try to ascertain the strands of which these threads are composed, and show how they were twisted into their present form in our experience to break up the complex forms of knowing, feeling, and willing, of which we are conscious, into their elements, and then trace their growth from their feeble beginnings up to the forms in which we find them.

But I have no such purpose. I intend from this point to confine myself to the intellectual or knowing side of the mental life, and to those phases of it that have most interest for us as teachers. But even here lack of space prevents me from pursuing a strictly logical course-from