Home Lessons.

Observer, Volume XI, Issue 653, 4 July 1891, Page 1

Home Lessons.

The imposition of home lessons has been a very old practice, and I consider a very bad one. School, not home, is the proper place for lessons. If children like to read at home, by all means let them ; but to assign lessons to be done at home, and to punish children if they have not done them, is a totally different thing. The former is voluntary, the latter compulsory. The one leaves the child free to do what he pleases as far as books are concerned; while the latter — that is, the system in vogue— makes the child's life out of school more of a servitude than that in school. This is a great difference

That children can teach themselves at home is the only defence possible to urge in support of the practice. But can they ? Can they at school ? Decidedly not. Consequently, there is really no sound reason whatever for the old superstition. Strike it down, then, at once, and put an end to it for ever.

More than this. lam aware that many of the worst and weakest teachers in the service have used the cloak of home lessons to delude the generally ignorant parents into the belief that the inflicting of home lessons requiring two or three hours' time was proof of the great progress that was being made, and used that device to attract pupils, often with success. Wipe out that little opening for fraud. Let the children have their evenings free of bugbears and nightmares ; do not becloud the short and only sunshine of their lives ; and they will, bodily and mentally, be all the better for it That they will then give up reading altogether, or read less than they do now, is a mistaken notion. They will read far more than they do now, and, what is moßt probable, a taste for reading will grow upon them, which does not now, but whioh is the most desirable and salutary of all the effects that education can produce.