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The first thing to be examined"into in considering the pretensions of any new system of education is its harmony with the whole constitution of the beings who are to be subjected to it . Nothing is easier than to discover methods by which separate portions of the human creature may be brought to a very high degree of perfection , provided other portions are left out of consideration ; and a partial system may promise great things and perform all its promises without being at all fit for general . adoption . Many an idiot
with a marvellous memory has been made an idiot by the education of his memory . Many a dyspeptic mathematician would willingly give up some of his scientific attainment , if his dyspepsia would go with it . Many a man , the workings of whose intellect are unusually true , sighs for that harmony of spirit with God and man of which he has been deprived by being taught to pursue means as ends . It is quite as possible to make a child a prodigy of
philosophy or learning at fifteen ( at the risk of sending him out of the world at that age ) as it is to make an infant twice the average size of infants by pouring in as much cream as the digestive organs will bear The great question is , not whether these feats may be achieved , but whether it is desirable that they should be achieved ; and before the claims of any new mode of education are investigated , it should be ascertained whether , granting them to be sound in themselves , they are likely to interfere with other claims of
greater importance . Nobody disputes this ; and yet what dreadful havoc do we daily see introduced into the constitution of the future man by the neglect of so plain a consideration ! So bitter is the heart-ache which compassionate observers feel from witnessing the destruction of some component part or another of the unhappy pupils of new systems , that they are tempted , in contradiction to reason , to conclude that a fortuitous education is the best thing that children can be blessed with after all . Such a conclusion is monstrous , we
allow ; but some excuse is to be made for it in the presence of all the immediate pain , and in prospect of all the future harm , caused by that exaggeration of systems already partial and exaggerated which now strikes us wherever we turn our eyes . It is melancholy to see a train of children going out to walk with open lesson books in their hands . It is melancholy to see the trickling tears which mock the parent while he talks of the primary necessity of interesting children in what they learn . It is melancholy to see the irritability induced by perpetual interrogation , and the dislike to learn
caused by the obligation to be always learning . It would be ludicrous , if it were not melancholy , to see little ones of eight years old drawing maps of the English Constitution , and explaining the relations of the legislative and executive departments , of King , Lords , and Commons , before they have learned any thing of domestic government but what they must detest . It is really not to be wondered at that good-natured people would rather see these victims of system with the rosy face and round eyes of a ploughboy , and as stupid as he , than dwindled in body and crushed in mind as they are too often at present seen to be . —The prospect is even worse than the present
• A Compendious Exposition of the Principles and Practice of Professor Jacotot ' s celebrated System of Education . By Joseph Payne . London . 1830 . Epitome Histories Sacrae , adapted , by a literal Translation , to Jacotot ' s Method . By Joseph Payne . London . 1831 .
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EXPOSITION OF PROFESSOR JACOTOT ' S SYSTEM OF EDUCATION . *
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1831, page 256, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2596/page/40/
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