By compelling our children to study real things from mere graphical representations, instead of making those things themselves, we compel them to waste the most precious time; we uselessly worry their minds; we accustom them to the worst methods of learning; we kill independent thought in the bud; and very seldom we succeed in conveying a real knowledge of what we are teaching. Superficiality, parrot like repetition, slavishness and inertia of mind are the results of our method of education. We do not teach our children how to learn.
The very beginnings of science are taught on the same pernicious system. In most schools even arithmetic is taught in the abstract way, and mere rules are stuffed into the poor little heads. The idea of a unit, which is arbitrary and can be changed at will in our measurement (the match, the box of matches, the dozen of boxes, or the gross; the metre, the centimetre the kilometre, and so on), is not impressed on mind, and therefore when the children come to the decimal fractions they are at a loss to understand them. In this country, the United States and Russia, instead of accepting the decimal system, which is the system of our numeration, they still torture the children by making them learn a system of weights and measures which ought to have been abandoned long since. The pupils lose at that full two years, and when they come later on to problems in mechanics and physics, schoolboys and schoolgirls spend most of their time in endless calculations which only fatigue them and inspire in them a dislike of exact science. But even there, where the decimal measures have been introduced, much time is lost in school simply because the teachers are not accustomed to the idea that every measure is only approximate, and that it is absurd to calculate with the exactitude of one gramme, or of one metre, when the measuring itself does not give the elements of such an exactitude. Whereas in