THE INTELLIGENT TEACHING OF HISTORY.

Mataura Ensign, Volume 10, Issue 754, 9 March 1888, Page 2

THE INTELLIGENT TEACHING OF HISTORY.

- No subject can be%no>e itamiilatSpg to boys than, history, if taught with' intelligence, but history is too-*' often taught as a mere piece of- '■". jcrltn." The class has a page or hfilf a^page of some densely-compressed history to get up for a lesson, and the teachec, Jnstead of bringing out the facts' m an interesting 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-Turkisb war, comptessed 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 ; •.pyobracted, the Russians did — what?" The prompt answer from the boy exammed was, " Crossed the Danube." " Quite right." Turning to another: "It took .the > Russians*— ivltat — to effect their purpose ? " Much doubt and hesitation., A* fc a successful boy shouts, " Six months." <v Quite right ;it took them six months^" Next boy. "After Jmaiiy battles, and *mucb delay caused by the heroic resistance of Plevna, Turkey did what?" This was a puzzler. The question went round : at last an intelligent Soy 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' notided a inaster'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 found that 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 out 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. I turned to the teacher, but the teacher had never noticed it whatever.—F rom " Secondary Education in Scotland," by Professor GK G. Ramsay, in Blackwood's Magazine,