CLEAR THE JUNGLE. 185 meaningless rote-work. There must be change. Looseness indeed is fatal. What is known ought to be known with exactness; but a gap is no harm, unless it is in the middle of the main highway. Monotony is the greatest enemy a teacher has to deal with. There is much danger, where all is new, as it is with beginners, lest a boy find a dead level without landmarks to guide. Where all is new, all cannot be mastered, and in the first confusion, unless he moves on, there is nothing to show what is intended to be done, or where he is to go. This perplexity is much increased very often by indiscriminate fault-finding, which instead of marking a distinct narrow path through the thicket, mixes up great and little, stumbling in the way, and wandering off the way, errors of ignorance, and errors of laziness, non-work and bad work, mental peccadilloes, and mental crimes, in one inextricable tangle from which there is no escape, because there is no clear idea whatever given to the boy mind of anything. Whereas though thoroughness is impossible, and there is far too much novelty to be mapped out, there is no impossibility whatever in marking, pioneer fashion, a track on which a boy shall feel perfectly safe. This feeling of perfect safety is the one thing no bad teacher dreams of giving, and which every good teacher makes it the first business of his life to try to impart. Again, 186 MOVE ON. INDEX EXPURGATORIUS. many difficulties in learning cannot be mastered by standing still over them; they can only be got rid of by movement. They are like what happens to the traveller. In the valley, on the low ground, the fog reigns, and as long as the traveller stops in the valley, will continue to reign, not to be wrestled with, or overcome; but let him move up, and move up, and by degrees mere movement brings him into a clearer atmosphere, the mist vanishes away, and at the top of the hill the whole great landscape in all its beauty is clear, and the little hollows with their fog are mere specks, even if they still are there. So it is with the boy mind, never let it stay too long in the hollows. Movement is absolutely necessary, at the same time the back work ought to be incessantly kept up by a small portion of time being devoted weekly to foundation work. And the teachers throughout a School ought to have an Index Expurgatorius of faults to be stamped out; each class keeping in communication with the one above, and below it, so as to waste no labour, and to be aware what the idler boys ought to know. Extreme accuracy in the structure of common sentences, and the forms of common words, ought to be universal. No good teacher allows any shortcoming here. But thoroughness in the ordinary sense of the word is impossible by the laws of nature. CHAPTER VII. PRACTICE OF TEACHING. The Blurred Chromograph. Sham Mistakes. Snores. THE actual teaching comes next. No words can exaggerate the importance of the first rule to be laid down. The observance of it would revolutionise the whole world of tuition. It is so simple that it can be observed. So simple, that few observe it. So simple, that those who want talk, and will do anything, and undergo anything rather than think, and act, will scorn to observe it. Many boys, who all their lives long know nothing because of early tangle, would know. All would save half their time. What then is this talisman, this Columbus's egg, this simple magic and magic simplicity, this 188 ARTICULATION SPUTTER AND MUTTER. Aladdin's lamp, which is to whisk everything into place, and create half a lifetime for all?-Articulation. Nothing more than a rigid, absolute unfailing exacting of articulate speech, and the pronouncing the final syllable of each word firmly, distinctly, and unmistakeably. The full force of this statement is not seen at once. It has been proved that accuracy is the first, and main object of training, both the power of accurate observation, and the power of reproducing accurately what has been observed. It has been proved also that one of the main advantages of an unspoken language as an instrument of training consists in the number of inflected forms, the changes, that is, in the final syllables. The orderly multitude of small word-labels, all calling for intelligent observation, is that property of language which makes language in the first instance such a valuable drill-master, apart from any other consideration. Every one has seen an imperfect chromograph. Let us suppose for a moment a chromograph of a book in which every final syllable was left out, or blurred, and this too in a foreign language. What would be the value of that copy to a learner with its pages full of words cut in half? Precisely the same value, that inarticulately spoken lessons are to the miserable victim, who is permitted to drop, or blur his final syllables. Add to THE BLURRED CHROMOGRAPH. 189 this that the human chromograph possesses the unenviable faculty of filling in all the blurred or dropped portions incorrectly at will, and so of keeping and cherishing not a merciful blank, but a most cruel torment of endless mistakes. And all this ruinous downward training is the necessary result of inarticulate speech, and the not sounding the final syllables. A habit is formed of confusion and indecision. Confusion and indecision breed constant disappointment, in a hard-working boy especially; inaccuracy in time settles down into a conviction that nothing is certain or fixed, or, at least, that he cannot by any possibility arrive at it. And this in later life leads to all those sloppy theories and careless confident judgments which fill the air; and finally ends in utter and general unbelief in any one being really master of his subject; with the fitting corollary, that if no one is master of his subject, any one is at liberty to express his own views on it; and the judgment of the skilled workman is of no more account than the babble of the after-dinner talker. Nothing is a more striking sign of the rotten state of education than the absolute non-existence of any respect for the judgment of the skilled workman in his own line, whatever that line may be. Only lawyers are exempt from this irony of being handled by the amateur! The evil of inarticulate speech has much |