EVERY-DAY KNOWLEDGE, FOR THE YOUNG. BY WILLIAM MARTIN, AUTHOR OF "ILLUSTRATED NATURAL PHILOSOPHY, LONDON: 1847. PREFACE. THE business of Modern Education, notwithstanding the attention which has been given to it of late years, may still be described as an art by which the teacher is taught to supersede, on the part of the pupil, any necessity for reflection. The latter, in too many cases, is taught words and not things, and crammed with epitomes and abstracts, addressed exclusively to the memory; while the faculties of observation, comparison, and judgment are left almost entirely without cultivation-a mode of procedure both unnatural and unphilosophical. This great defect in education is by no means, however, to be attributed to the scholastic professor, but to the elementary works which have for some years been almost the only vehicles of scholastic instruction in this country. These have generally assumed that form (the catechetical), in which many words may be gained without the trouble of thinking about their meaning; and a parrot-like proficiency acquired, with an amazing deficiency of idea, and with little development of mind. By it, the tutor merely goes through a form of ascertaining whether a given task has been performed or not; he has no internal basis for his questions, nor the child any for his answers; but as learning by heart that which is put before them, is assumed to be the proper discipline of young children; and as the making of one set of phrases suggest another to the memory, is easier than forming one idea out of others in the mind, the catechetical form of instruction has been preferred to all others, and thus we have the φιλολογοι, the word men, and not the λογοφιλοι, the reason men of Zeno, perpetuated among us. Instruction has degenerated into a hollow pedantic form; and the same empiricism, which |