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Untitled Article
that it loses its sanctity and effect by being too common , and I entirely disapprove of the practice . " Although we have noticed Mr . Wilderspin ' s evidence at some length , there are many interesting points that we have not space to advert to . . Mr . Wilderspin himself is a curious character . He was an ignorant though benevolent fanatic , converted into a highly useful ^ pd intelligent instructor by unremitting experiment and attention to children . Many of his metaphysical remarks are very curious . The power of unconscious imitation ie so stroner in children .
that a cracked voice , or drawling tone in the teacher , will insure a similar voice or tone in the children ; if the teacher has any awkwardness of gait or vulgarity about him , his pupils invariably acquire the same ; and there is an account by Mr , Wilderspin , in another work , of " a master who had a cast in the eye , and all the young children squinted ; and of another whuo had a club-foot , in imitation of whom all the children limped . " Mr . Wilderspin formerly thought that children were more
inclined to do wrong than right , but the result of his experience with 17 , 000 infants induces him to think that the tendency to right is to wrong as two and a-half to one . Mr . Wilderspin s testimony is by no means in favour of the National , or of the British and Foreign Schools .
Mr . Dorsey , one of the masters of the Glasgow High School , is a very remarkable young man , who has succeeded , we understand , in introducing real intellectual and moral instruction to an extent rarely , if ever , witnessed in this country ; and it is to be regretted that his examination was so brief . His class possess a variety of models and objects in natural history and mechanics , which cost little or nothing , as , in six months , from seven to eight hundred specimens were brought by the pupils . Every school , he says , ought to have such a collection , in order that the pupils may be taught by actual objects rather than
words ; and he considers that Mr . Wood ' s celebrated Edinburgh School is defective , because it does not connect objects themselves with verbal knowledge . The Scotch schoolmasters are , as he thinks , excessively ignorant ; religion is taught by rote , and morals not at all . Though obviously a religious man , he states , " I beg leave to observe that 1 decidedly object to the
use ot the Jiiblo as a school-book , as a book for teaching mere writing , spelling , and grammar . I think the Bible ought ttv ^ be looked-to as a code of laws for our guidance in this world hikL to the next . In many schools it is made so much a schoolbook that the pupils lose all reverence for it , and , in fact , acquire a hatred for it in after life . " Lie considers that lectures arm the only mode of improving the adult population ~> -a great effect having * been produced in Glasgow and its environs by this mean »—and he suggests many ways in whiob lecture * may be improved and extended .
Untitled Article
Education Report . 73
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Feb. 2, 1836, page 73, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2654/page/9/
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