We clip from "The Journal of Education's" report of the annual meeting at Saratoga, N.Y., the following gems, extracts from the varied essays read upon that occasion. No comment is requisite on the adaptability of sentiments like the following, to improve our present defective system of education, and so elevate the whole human race.
The surfeit following a plethoric diet, illustrates a common mental dyspepsia. The quantity, rather than the quality of attainment, is too often the method of progress. Efficiency, the power of using the faculties and resolves of the mind, is the test of advancement. Cram has a moral taint, fostering ostentation and conceit. It is doing violence to the Soul, to its innate love of truth, and of growth by the nutriment of truth, to feed it thus with the mere husks of knowledge.—
There is one caution to be remembered, and it is this: Methods beget a disease, morbid self-consciousness. Children get a habit of introspection, born of pedantic methods, out of which grow the diseases of modern life.—
