THE INTELLIGENT TEACHING OF HISTORY.

Bruce Herald, Volume XIX, Issue 1933, 17 February 1888, Page 6

THE INTELLIGENT TEACHING OF HISTORY.

No subject can be more stimulating to boys than history, if taught with intelligence, but history is too often taught as a mere piece of " cram." The class has a page or half a page of some densely-compressed history to get up for a lesson, and the teacher, instead of bringing out the facts in an interest- . ing pictorial way, and fixing their minds upon the ideas which it contains, contents himself with asking the pupil to reproduce verbatim, one by one, without any explanation, without any tracing of cause or effect, the facts given -in the passage. Not long ago I heard a class examined as follows. The subject was the last Russo-Turkish war, compressed into about one page. The teacher- kept his finger on the place, and questioned the class by taking up each sentence as it stood and turning it into an interrogative form. "After many months of negotiations vainly protracted, the "Russians did — ivJiat?" The prompt answer from the boy examined was, " Crossed* the Danube." " Quite right*" Turning^ to another : "It took the Russians— wJiat — to effect their purpose ? " Much doubt and hesitation. At last a successful boy shouts, " Six months." ": Quite right jit took them six months." 'Next boy. "After |many battles, and much delay caused by the heroic resistance of Plevna, Turkey did what?" This was a puzzler. The question went round : at last an intelligent boy answered triumphantly, " Lay prostrate at the feet of Russia ? " lat once asked what was the meaning of " prostrate," but no satisfactory answer could be obtained.' In another case I noticed a master's finger slip too far down the page, between one question and the next, and he inverted all modern political history, by assigning to 1834 a series of figures which related% to 1832. In another school I f otfhd thatjp an advanced class had written down on their slates, from dictation, an admirable summary of a period. On examination I found they were nearly all equally good, and all the good ones were identical. It turned but that these advanced pupils had simply reproduced the dictation word for word; In; the /passage there occurred a very- unusual phrase. Not one pupil could explain it^» Ixturned to the teacher, but the teacher had never noticed it whatever.—From "Secondary Education in Scotland," by Professor G, G. Ramsay, in Blackwood's Magazine,