On Some Defects in Public School Education: A Lecture Delivered at the Royal Institution, on Friday, February 8th, 1867. With Notes and Appendices

Front Cover
Macmillan and Company, 1867 - 67 pages
 

Selected pages

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 47 - I shall detain you now no longer in the demonstration of what we should not do, but straight conduct you to a hill-side, where I will point you out the right path of a virtuous and noble education ; laborious indeed at the first ascent, but else so smooth, so green, so full of goodly prospect, and melodious sounds on every side, that the harp of Orpheus was not more charming.
Page 28 - ... forcing the empty wits of children to compose themes, verses, and orations which are the acts of ripest judgment and the final work of a head filled by long reading and observing with elegant maxims and copious invention. These are not matters to be wrung from poor striplings like blood out of the nose or the plucking of untimely fruit...
Page 22 - Would not a Chinese, who took notice of this way of breeding, be apt to imagine that all our young gentlemen were designed to be teachers and professors of the dead languages of foreign countries, and not to be men of business in their own?
Page 47 - How charming is divine Philosophy ! Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose, But musical as is Apollo's lute, And a perpetual feast of nectared sweets, Where no crude surfeit reigns.
Page 22 - First, we do amiss to spend seven or eight years merely in scraping together so much miserable Latin and Greek, as might be learned otherwise easily and delightfully in one year.
Page 10 - Of boyhood ; — when young Dionysus seems All glorious as he burst upon the East A jocund and a welcome conqueror ; And Aphrodite, sweet as from the sea She rose and floated in her pearly shell, A laughing girl...
Page 12 - Mated with a squalid savage — what to me were sun or clime! I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time...
Page 34 - There is no study that could prove more successful in producing often thorough idleness and vacancy of mind, parrot-like repetition and sing-song knowledge, to the abeyance and destruction of the intellectual powers, as well as to the loss and paralysis of the outward senses, than our traditional study and idolatry of language.
Page 47 - ... that asinine feast of sowthistles and brambles, which is commonly set before them as all the food and entertainment of their tenderest and most docible age.
Page 22 - And because it is deplorable to consider the loss which children make of their time at most schools, employing, or rather casting away, six or seven years in the learning of words only, and that too very imperfectly...

Bibliographic information