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CRITICAL NOTICES.
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Note: This text has been automatically extracted via Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software. The text has not been manually corrected and should not be relied on to be an accurate representation of the item.
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Critical Notices.
CRITICAL NOTICES .
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Art . IV . — Addresses , with Prayers and Original Hymns , for the Use of Families ana Schools . By a Lady , authoress of " Devotional Exercises for the Use of Young Persons . " London . Hunter . 1826 . This is a praiseworthy attempt to supply a deficiency in our theological literature . All persons engaged in the
religious education of the young must have felt the want of something more brief , intelligible and interesting than the majority of sermons for family reading . These Addresses , twelve in number , are not by any means all we want , but , as far as they go , they will serve a useful purpose , and , we hope , will open the way for further attempts in the same direction .
Among them the first , sixth , and seventh are particularly calculated to impress . — Here and there we have remarked a passage somewhat too speculative , as at p . 142 , and rather too confident an assumption of a disputed and non-essential doctrine , as in the Address on " the Character of Christ ; ' * but every family
of young persons , where religious instruction is conducted on general Unitarian principles , will find this little book a valuable present . On the whole , it is perhaps superior to the Author ' s Devotional Exercises , which have been already favourably received by the public .
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Art . V . — Hints to Parents ; with Exercises for exciting the attention and strengthening the thinking poicers of Children , in the spirit of PestalozzVs method . Nos . I . II . III . IV and . V . Darton and Harvey . Price \ s . each .
Twelve years have now elapsed since Mrs . Hamilton , in a very sensible and strong appeal to the patrons and directors of schools , * endeavoured to shew how much the benefit of the Bell and Lancaster modes of teaching " might be increased by a partial adoption of the
* Hints to the Patrons and Directors of Schools , by Mrs . Elizabeth Hamilton . Longman and Co .
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plan of Pestalozzi . " That appeal , we are sorry to say , appears to have been made with little effect . It still continues too much the custom to teach children dogmatically , and to feed them with words without examination or development of
the capacity for receiving them . It is yet too much our habit to deal in general ideas ; we talk to children of right and wrong , of being good and being naughty ; but if persons engaged in education would take the trouble to inquire , they would soon find that there is a most
lamentable ignorance in their pupils with respect to the limits of good and evil , that while extreme and glaring vices which are of rarer occurrence , are , perhaps , marked out pretty distinctly in their minds as things to be avoided , the greatest confusion prevails with regard to the more common errors of human
life . Mrs . Hamilton has well pointed out the absurdity of denominating elementary instruction in reading and writing , education : she shews that the improvement of moral perceptions is the point at which we ought to aim , she knew that it was necessary to arouse and cultivate the affections and faculties before this could be done ; hence she recommends the Pestalozzian method in preference to any other .
In the same spirit is conceived the little work now under notice . It is an appeal to mothers , to whom alone the office of superintending the infant years of children belongs ; and it aims at impressing upon them the importance of paying attention to the exercise and development of the faculties , from the very earliest period at which the eye and ear of the child are directed towards
outward objects . It is no new attempt to burthen the minds of children with an oppressive load of learning , but a gradually strengthening process by which ail their powers will be enabled to acquire energy , readiness , and correctness . According to the Pestalozzian principle ,
a child is early led to make accurate observations on external objects , their number , form , and properties . The name is early associated with the thing . When an instructor receives a child thus prepared , how different is his task from that of him who finds his pupil ' s mind
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1827, page 684, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1800/page/52/
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