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by such a holy ardor and invincible determination as will conquer time and fate, and fulfill the conditions, on which, alone, such honors can be won. And if the strong-voiced angel, who flies through heaven crying, "Woe, woe, woe," to the inhabiters of earth, is ever to be silenced, he will be silenced by the strong acclamations of those whom teachers have been among the blessed and honored instruments of preparing for the ransom of the world. Ilorace Mann.

WHAT SHALL CHILDREN STUDY?

BY DR. J. G. HOLLAND.

A PROFESSOR in one of the prominent colleges of New York has lately remarked that the peculiar defects of the students under his charge relate to the primary branches of education. He says that students who come well fitted for college in the studies prescribed-students much at home in the dead languages and the mathematics-cannot write good English, and find it impossible to spell what they write correctly. It is not a month since a letter was shown to us from a New England college, written by the representative man of a literary society, which revealed a lamentable lack of spelling-book. And to come nearer home-to the children among whom we move daily—we know a little girl, quick to learn, who has attended the best schools that could be procured for her all her life, a girl who can play Mozart's Sonatas with good taste and effect, who has been through Colburn's First Lessons and understood them, who has studied geography, history, and grammar, yet who, in the writing of a letter occupying a page and a quarter of note paper, made fifteen blunders in her orthography. Now who is to blame for this state of things?

The matter is become a serious one, alike with parents and children, and it will be well to inquire into it by the aid of the lights of experience. There are very few persons in the world who can recall what they learned of history, and geography, and philosophy, and astronomy, before the age of thirteen, as anything of positive value to them. We would like to have every man and woman who takes interest enough in this article to read it, try to recall and survey the actual practical benefits resulting from the early pursuit of these studies. How much do you know about them now, that you learned then? Do you remember a single valuable

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fact of history, or geography, or philosophy, that you acquired then? Are you not painfully conscious that the months and years which you devoted in your childhood to the acquisition of dry rules and facts, of whose value and relations you knew nothing, were thrown away? Do you not feel that if, during those years, you had been taught to write the English language in a legible hand and in a presentable style of composition, you would have gained something that would be of incalculable value now?

It is notorious that though our people in general are better educated than any other people on the earth, the rarest accomplishments are those of good reading and good writing. Men and women are coming every day into the active work of life with an absolute hatred of the pen. They come out of the common schools, the seminaries and the colleges, with a decided aversion to the writing of their mother tongue, and a marked inability to do it creditably. Indeed, the cause of this dislike of writing abides in the consciousness of inability to write well. Men get into the business routine of letterwriting, after a stupid, formal sort, but are all afloat when asked to write a petition to the City Council, or when they undertake to write a letter to a newspaper, or even to a friend. Women upon whose education thousands of dollars have been expended, write the merest baby-talk to their correspondents, and write no more frequently than they are obliged to write. Nothing scares them so much as to be obliged to write a letter to either a man or a woman who writes well. Now we believe that one of the leading objects of all our early training in the schools, should be the acquisition of the power to write the English language as readily and as well as we can speak it. We believe that the foundations of this power can all be laid before the age of thirteen, so that the writing of a composition will be a pleasure and not a pain, an honor and not a disgrace to the writer. Pefect spelling should be and can be acquired before this age. The orthog raphy of the language is something that the childish mind acquires just as readily as the mature mind, and childhood should abundantly suffice for this work. By the present practice, we do not educate, we cram. There is no educing of power and faculty-only a stuffing with facts which the recipient has no power to state.

Reformation in the processes of juvenile training has carried us all backwards. The good old plan of studying, first of all, and thoroughly, reading, spelling, writing, and arithmetic, was the best plan; and some of the old people, in VOL. XI.

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Official Department.

their hand writing and their orthography, shame their grandchildren of to-day. A child who, at the age of thirteen, can write a good hand, spell correctly and express himself by his pen in plain English, and who knows enough about arithmetic to make change across a counter without scratching his head has done better than most children do. And a child who has not accomplished all this, but has devoted his time instead to studies so exacting as to forbid attention to these more simple and more essential pursuits, has (to the shame of his teachers be it said) wasted his time. At the age of fourteen, a child will learn more in one month about geography, philosophy, chemistry, etc., than he can learn in one year at the age of ten. The time devoted to history by a child of ten, eleven, or twelve, and thus taken from that necessary to the acquisition of the power of writing well, is time wasted; for at the age of sixteen or twenty, more history will be acquired by three days of intelligent reading than by a whole term of juvenile study. It does not avail to say that discipline and not the acquisition of facts is the object sought. There is no discipline for the young mind, or even for the mature mind, that equals that which comes from the organization and expression of thought; and we are doing an absolute wrong to our children by permitting them to be defrauded of this discipline, and the accomplishments and advantages that go with it. Mass. Teacher.

OFFICIAL DEPARTMENT.

To School Visitors:

Copies of the annual report of the Superintendent of Common Schools, have been put up in packages which will be sent to New Haven, to be distributed to the different towns by the representatives to the General Assembly.

The Acting School Visitors will please distribute the copies sent, to all the members of the board. The report for the present year, contains all the school laws now in force, with such notes and explanations as seemed necessary to give a clear view of the operations of the laws. It is hoped that the publication of the laws in this form will secure more uniform action under the laws and more universal compliance with their provisions.

Copies of the compilation of the school laws of 1860, can still be obtained from this office for districts not supplied. All the laws relating to common schools which have been passed by the General Assembly since 1860, have been published in the Connecticut Common School Journal, and with that sent to acting school visitors.

DAVID N. CAMP, Superintendent of Common Schools.

NEW BRITAIN, May 14, 1863.

"

For the Common School Journal.

MY FIRST SCHOOL-CONTINUED.

Or one boarding place I must speak, for I can never forget the place or the family. The house was at the foot of a steep hill which sloped to the south-east. Just by the house babbled a clear brook which supplied a trough by the road-side with water. Near by was a dam of considerable height, over which the water fell in the "January thaw," which happened while I was boarding here, with a sound subdued by the distance it traversed before it reached my attic into music which comes back now at times with a soothing and even enchanting power. The sound of the falling water was mingled with the peculiar cadence of a large pine-tree, on the other side of the house, when the wind stirred its leaves. One of those, or the two combined, never failed to greet me at the hour of retiring and at cock-crowing. I fell asleep and I awoke within the influence of that music of nature to which none can well be deaf. And as the objects of one sense are often very suggestive to another sense, this melody of the brook and the tree suggested to the eye of fancy, kindled by a familiar acquaintance with the Pilgrim's Progress and kindred books, pictures which wanted only proper expression to become either poems or paintings.

The house itself was a large story-and-a-half one, unpainted, with the end to the road. In front was a huge pile

of maple logs, suggestive at once of "sugaring off” in the spring, and of generous fires in the winter. Of course, I go to this new place after school, and the family have been consulted about my coming just then. Let us enter by the front door, opening directly into the sitting room. Notice on the broad stone which lies before the door, a small iron vessel, called a skillet I believe. Near is a hogshead to catch the water as it runs from the eaves. Can you guess the use of this skillet? Hither all the family, school-master included, come in the morning to wash their faces in this "normal" wash-room. We shall find the towel and a looking-glass,about four by six, and the only one in the house-near the door as we go in. Within is a large room, dimly lighted, but clean and inviting. A huge fire-place and a glowing fire, answer the promise of the wood-pile outside. In the chimney corner sits grandpa with locks as white as the snow he has seen drifting round the homestead these sixty winters. He greets me with a homely welcome, and bids me sit near his own nook. Close to his chair sits a curlyheaded, rosy-cheeked boy, eyeing alternately the preparations for supper, and the strange teacher. Before the fire stands the once famous "Dutch oven," and on the coals simmers a "spider" full of sausages. On slats nailed to the unceiled beams overhead, hang strings of apples, circles of pumpkins and lumps of beef, drying. In one corner is a ladder leading to what is upstairs in our houses. But the master of the house, and his son, my pupil in the first class, have come from the barn, where they have been busy with their evening "chores," and the oven and spider have yielded up their contents. So grandpa and I are invited to "sit in and eat." There is no cloth on the table, nor any "plate." The sausages aforesaid, are flanked by a dish of potatoes, unpeeled that their bursting skins may disclose the mealy pulp beneath. The biscuit are faultless, and the butter is sweet, and all is in abundance. Though the cup that "cheers but not inebriates" is not real "store tea," but only" herb tea," and "seasoned" with maple "sweetening," the school-master at least does not complain. I am told to help myself, as