4. The cultivation of the taste and the imagination, or the faculties which derive pleasure from music, painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, and works of fiction.
Under the head SCIENCE will be given a complete tabular view of the various branches of human knowledge or sciences, together with the corresponding arts or applications. It will there be shown that there is a natural order of dependency among the fundamental sciences, which determines the order in which the different kinds of facts should be taken up in learning. (An admirable mapping out of the whole field of knowledge in relation to E., is given by Dr. Neil Arnott in his Survey of Human Prog ress (Lond. 1861).
The different offices and employments characteristic of an advanced state of society, require a corresponding difference in the amount of knowledge and skill possessed by those who are to fill them—a difference which is vaguely and inadequately expressed in the usual division of schools into primary schools, middle or higher schools, and uni versities.
A course of primary instruction embraces only what is considered absolutely indis pensable. Not that there is a limit to the degree of intelligence that is desirable in any class of the community). but for those who must, from early years, spend most of their time in manual labor, i.e., for the vast majority of the race, there is a very short limit to the degree possible. The grand question here would be to determine the order of desirableness of the different subjects to be taught, so that, beginning with the most indispensable, more and more might be added as circumstances would permit. Until recently, reading, writing, and arithmetic were considered the beginning and end of a course of primary instruction. These, however, are not so much knowledge themselves as instruments for acquiring knowledge; and therefore the primary teacher in the pres ont day considers it his duty to give, in addition, as much information of a directly useful kind as possible. But in avoiding one error, he not unfrequently falls into the opposite; for, after all, the three branches above named are the first and most indispen sable steps iu instruction. Those who can read and write may acquire information after leaving school. Reading and writing, unless learned at school, are, as a rule, never
learned; and thus the grand access to knowledge remains for ever shut. Nor is it enough to have made a beginning in the arts of reading, writing, and counting; unless such a degree of facility is acquired before leaving school as to render the exercise a pleasure, it is not kept up in after-life, and the little that was learned is soon forgotten. We believe that in all schoolS, but especially where the children are liable to be early withdrawn, everything else ought to be held secondary until the painful stage in learn ing to read, write, and count, is fairly got over. With regard to the positive knowledge hitherto got in primary schools, there is a general feeling that few teachers succeed in .diving it a direct bearing on the actual concerns of life. Hence the aversion expressed in many quarters to the introduction of the " ologies" into common schools, and the rather vague demand for the teaching of "common things." Middle or secondary schools either serve for those who have leisure for a higher degree of culture than the elementary course above described, or they serve as nurseries for the highest kind of educational institutions, viz., the universities. Under the head of secondary schools may be ranged the institutions that go by the names of high schools, academies, grammar-schools (the gymnasiums of Germany, and the colleges of France). In these, the course of instruction usually embraces other languages besides the mother tongue, and more or less of the elements of the various sciences. The titles of a series of text-books, such as those composing Chambers' Educational Course, give a notion of the great variety of subjects that are considered requisite in middleolass education. Much yet remains to be done to chalk out a judicious course of middle-class instruction —sufficiently wide to be a foundation for after-acquisitions; and yet not so Multifarious and detailed as to be impossible to overtake except as ill-digested cram.—Where prepara tion for the university is the object, Greek and Latin arc the chief subjects of attention.