Test for Systems––We have, too, in our possession, a test for Systems that are brought under our notice, and can pronounce upon their educational value. For example, some time ago the London Board Schools held an exhibition of work; and great interest was excited by an exhibit which came from New York representing a week’s work (on ‘Herbartian’ lines) in a school. The children worked for a week upon ‘an apple.’ They modelled it in clay, they painted it in brushwork, they stitched the outline on cardboard, they pricked it, they laid it in sticks (the pentagonal form of the seed vessel.) Older boys and girls modelled an apple-tree and made a little ladder on which to run up the apple tree and gather the apples, and a wheel-barrow to carry the apples away, and a great deal more of the same kind. Everybody said, ‘How pretty, how ingenious, what a good idea!’ and went away with the notion that here, at last, was education. But we ask ‘What was the informing idea?’ The external shape, the internal contents of an apple,––matters with which the children were already exceedingly well acquainted. What mental habitudes were gained by this week’s work? They certainly learned to look at the apple, but think how many things they might have got familiar acquaintance with in the time. Probably the children were not consciously bored because the impulse of the teachers’ enthusiasm carried them on, But, think of it––
’Rabbits hot and rabbits cold,
Rabbits young and rabbits old
Rabbits tender and rabbits tough’––
no doubt those children had enough of apples anyway. This ‘apple’ course is most instructive to us as emphasising the tendency in the human mind to accept and rejoice in any neat system which will produce immediate results, rather than to bring every such little course to the test of whether it does or does not further either or both of our great educational principles.