Facsimile PDF - Online Library of Liberty

88 METHODS OF SOCIAL REFORM.
nfter-life. It is, in fact, Mr. Cross and those who think with
him who sdvucate a kind of I‘ Cram,” ondurhg, it is true, but
still “ bad Cram.” The true view of education, on the contrary,
is to regard it as a course of training. The youth in a
gymuaaium practises npon the horizontal bar, in order develop to
hie muscular powers generally ; he does not intend to go on
posturing upon horizontal bars all through life. School is D
place where tho mental fibres are to be exercised, trained,
expanded, developed, and strengthened, not fc crammed” or
loaded with If useful knowledge.”
The wholo of a youth’s subsequent career is one long course
of technical f‘ cramming,” in which any quantity of useful
facts are supplied to him P1o~cns roZe7ls. Tho merchant gets
his technical knowledgo at tho clerk’s desk, the barrister in tho
conveyancer’s offices or tho lam courts, the engineer in the
workshop nnd the field. It is the very purpose of a liberal
education, as it is correctly callod, to develop and train the
plastic fibres of the youthful brain, so as to prevent them
taking too early a de6nit.e set,” which mill afterwards narrow
and restrict the range of acquisition and judgment. I will
evon go so far as to say that it is hardly desirable for the
actual things taught at school to stay in the mind for life.
Tho 8ourco of error is t,ho failure to distinguish between the
fvm and the matter of knomledge, between the facts themselves
and the mauner in which the mental powers deal with
facts.
It is wonderful that Mr. Cross and those who moralise in
his strain do not perceive that the actual facta which a man
deals with in life are infinite in number, and cannot be renlombercd
in LL finite brain. The psychologists, too, seem to me
to be at fault in this matter, for they have not sufficiently dram
attention to the varying degrees of duration required in a wellorganiaed
memory. We commonly use the word memory 50
aa to cover the facnltiea of Retention, Repmdnction, and Representation,
88 described by Hamilton, and very little consideration
will show that in different cases we need tho powers of
retention, of suggestion, and of imagination in very different
degreees. In some cme9 we require to remember a thing ody