Education : Intellectual, Moral and Physical

Contents: Preface. 1. Education. 2. Intellectual Education. 3. Moral Education. 4. Physical Education.

The greatest defect in our programmes of education is entirely overlooked. While much is being done in the detailed improvement of our systems in respect both of matter and manner, the most pressing desideratum has not yet been even recognized as a desideratum. To prepare the young for the duties of life is tacitly admitted to be the end which parents and school-masters should have in view; and happily, the value of the things taught, and the goodness of the methods followed in teaching them are now ostensibly judged by their fitness to this end.

No rational plea can be put forward for leaving the Art of Education out of our curriculum. Whether as bearing on the happiness of parents themselves, or whether as affecting the characters and lives of their children and remote descendants, we must admit that a knowledge of the right methods of juvenile culture, physical, intellectual, and moral, is a knowledge of extreme importance. This topic should be the final one in the course of instruction passed through by each man and woman. As physical maturity is marked by the ability to produce offspring, so mental maturity is marked by the ability to train those offspring. The subject which involves all other subjects, and therefore the subject in which education should culminate, is the Theory and Practice of Education.