but unless they can give us some hint of the modus operandi, some idea of the course to be pursued their elegant talk is practically wind. Every one who has taught three months knows that beautiful theories do not always work well in the daily practice of the school-room.

Give me the man that can tell what to do, rather than one who can only say something ought to be done. I cannot wait till every town in the State is ready to furnish "uncovered school-rooms" to teach good morals in. to teach good morals in. What am I to do in this department to-morrow, and the next day, and every day? Let those who have been successful with any plan of moral instruction give us the result of their experience, and, above all, the manner of operating. Can you put a pupil through a course of morals, as you would teach him the science of arithmetic? I have a few pupils who learn arithmetic slowly enough; possibly if I had a course of morals to administer to them, they might take to that, and yet live to be great moral lights.

I have a school in the suburbs, numbering from fifty to sixty pupils, whose ages vary from five to sixteen years. Consequently I have two or three distinct offices to sustain: first, I am a primary school teacher, and as such I should be endowed with all patience, wisdom, skill, gentleness, and forbearance ; second, I am teacher of my intermediate department, a place second in importance only to the station of primary teacher; and lastly, I have a class that would stand high in any grammar school. I will not weary your patience by attempting to portray, or enumerate even, all the difficulties of the situation. It is sufficient to say that time passes swiftly in school, if not always pleasantly. My pupils are from all grades of society. Some are under the best parental influence, while others are taught to swear, and allowed to lie, and permitted to steal by their parents. They never swear in my hearing, and seldom lie to me, but that they do such things no one acquainted with the character of some of their parents will have the hardihood to doubt. Now, Messrs. Editors, if you have any recipe by which I can correct all these faults and restrain these vices and cause these youths to grow up respectable men and

women, truthful, honest, reverent, and cultivated, please to send it forth to the teachers of the land, and you will thereby confer an unmeasured benefit on many who are striving to do something to civilize the youth in common schools. Yours very respectfully,

REMARKS.

IDO.

Our correspondent's queries touch upon a very weighty matter, and point to what we think a very frequent and a very grave defect in schools. We will give him some of our thoughts upon it, hoping the subject may be taken up by other contributors.

We have little faith in moral sermons to children. They go in at one ear and out at the other, if indeed they can be said to enter at all. We do not therefore believe that any deficiency in moral instruction in our public schools will ever be supplied by set lessons in ethics. Neither in this country is the remedy to be looked for in the intercourse of the teacher with the pupils out of school or in the play-ground, simply because teachers here have little or no such intercourse, and are not likely to have under our system; and except in the case of here and there a peculiarly constituted teacher, we believe that such an artificial interference and oversight of the sports and plays of young people is apt to be disagreeable and irksome to both parties, and to produce little if any good. Let children sometimes enjoy the freedom natural to their age; only take care that you train them in such a way that they can be trusted with their freedom.

But this must be done, and it is a grave question whether to any extent it is done. We think most decidedly that very often it is not, and that while children get enough, and more than enough knowledge of capes and isthmuses, of common divisors and square roots, of subjects and predicates, they are frequently dismissed from school to undertake all the responsibilities of life in a republican country with only such knowledge as they may have picked up incidentally of the simplest moral duties. The result is easy to conjecture. Our schools

turn out a great many boys who afterwards become skilful and accomplished rogues, all the more skilful and accomplished for the excellent intellectual training they have received, which serves them as a most convenient instrument for their knavery. But a still larger class are those multitudes of weak people without settled principles or definite moral character of any kind, who are turned into the world only to become the sport of all its accidents, shapeless and helpless logs, drifting down the current of life. These are the people who form the "rank and file," as it is called, of parties, the material on whom demagogues and bigots work, and use for their base purposes as though every man's sect and party ought not to stand in his own two shoes; as though a sect or a party ought not to consist of so many individual units, as indestructible in their individuality as the ultimate particles of matter! Do we educate such men and women, teach them to have wills and opinions of their own, to know what virtue is, and to love it, and to know only enough of vice to hate it? Is not this to be taught, almost as much as the difference between subject and predicate, or the theory of the greatest common divisor? And if schoolmasters and mistresses do not teach it, partially at least, where will the children learn it? From the newspapers and the scenes of the street? Practically, it is from these that a vast number of children do get their moral education. Practically, here is where they learn to use the intellects that have been sharpened by the intellectual training of school; and how they use this knowledge, developments in banks and counting-rooms every day, and the profligacy of politics, and the want of moral courage in public life, are sadly teaching us.

sexes.

We detest moral twaddle, - that weakish stuff about good little boys and girls, and naughty boys and girls, so much of which is written by well-meaning but weak old ladies of both None see through it sooner than children themselves, and you may bedizen the little books that contain it ever so gaudily, their natural instinct is sure to reject it. Thank Heaven it is so, and that children at least know what is fresh and true from what is hollow and conventional. But we do think, with our correspondent, that there is great need of good

practical methods of training the moral sense of children in such a manner as to prepare them to withstand the thousand evil influences which surround them in actual life.

We should place the greatest reliance for attaining this object, not upon set lessons in ethics, but upon various indirect influences; and first and foremost we should place the personal character of the teacher. If he is what he should be, an earnest, upright, and honorable man, who loves God and his neighbor; if he is working not only to earn his bread, as he certainly should be doing, but with the higher object also of doing his very best in this world while he lives in it; if he is moreover an independent, self-respecting man, who fully exercises his right of being a man and a citizen as well as a schoolmaster, we see not how his scholars, brought in such close contact with him, can help respecting and taking pattern by him. And being such as this, we should expect him to use all the indirect opportunities which school-work offers of inculcating moral lessons and these are more than would at first sight appear. For first there are the readings from the Bible. The teaching of theology is strictly forbidden in our schools, but the great fundamental doctrines of morality, as taught in the precepts of Jesus, the doctrine of love to God as our Father, of responsibility to him and dependence on him, are common to all Christian sects; and it is very easy for a teacher who is desirous of making his readings really useful, to select such lessons from the Bible, and chiefly from the very words of Jesus, as, impressively read and constantly repeated and applied as often as occasion offers to the actual experience of the scholars' lives, cannot fail to enter their minds and be remembered afterwards. We do not say that any cold perfunctory performance of the duty will have this influence, — any careless, hap-hazard reading from the multifarious contents of all the different writings which are bound together in the Bible, and so many of which are utterly unsuited to school reading. How would the teaching of Arithmetic prosper, if the teacher were to begin his lesson each day at the place where he happened to open his book? But we know from some experience how interesting a lesson for the day may be

made up by the careful selection of those passages in the Scriptures which are of vital interest in the moral education of youth. And we do not think the teacher need fear the constant repetition of such passages; rather is a repetition desirable, that they may become very familiar to the pupil's mind.

Then there is the reading-book and its lessons. We think indeed that a reform will some time or other take place in the making of reading-books. One might almost say that many of them seem to have been put together by compilers who never saw a child. They consist of rhetorical pieces, elegant enough no doubt, and selected with sufficient taste, but as ill suited to the wants of boy and girl nature, and as far from all their sympathies, as would be choice extracts from a Report on the Tariff, or a treatise on the five points of Calvinism. Why is not a reading-book possible that may be made the central point of moral teaching, and yet may be a book that boys and girls can love? We do not say that such a book can be made to the order of a bookseller; it must rather be the ripened fruit of a wise and judicious teacher's life. But we believe such a book possible, and hope the day will come when it will be made. Meantime, even the poorest of those in use furnish some good texts for the thoughtful teacher's commentary.

Then there is the teaching of history, and especially of United States history, and the Constitution. Surely here is room for a teacher who is alive to his work to teach boys the duties of good citizens, and to enforce his teachings by the examples of great and good men of other times. We take it for granted that Massachusetts teachers are all lovers of liberty, and believers that those doctrines for which our revolutionary fathers fought, and which they embodied in our Declaration of Independence and our Massachusetts Bill of Rights, are not "glittering generalities " and " rhetorical flourishes," but the only foundations on which a republican government can rest; and we do not well see how a teacher can really fulfil the requisitions of the school-law without actually teaching that great branch of morals which includes the duties of good citizens. This implies that he must know them himself, and that he is