Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and modes of culture must adapt themselves to these differences. He would be like a blind man leading a blind man who should attempt to teach, ignorant of this great law. 3. Human Beings Have Been Created With Die. rERENT Tastes And Talents To Fit Them For PerformIng DIFFERENT DUTIES OR FOR OCCUPYING DIFFERENT Spheres In Life.—That children differ in tastes and talents every parent and every teacher is agreed. The Bible intimates the same fact. The reason probably is that, as in nature's system each necessary office was designed to be filled by a qualified officer, men differ because their social duties or their spheres in life are different. But, whatever the reason, the fact id certain, and is of great significance to the educator. It teaches him that he must plan his system of Teaching with reference to the peculiar tastes aiid talents of children. Doubtless, certain kinds of general knowledge and certain kinds of mental discipline may be considered indispensable for all; but, in addition, every true teacher should consider it a privilege to furnish each one of his pupils an opportunity for the development of his special powers. The aim of education is not to make all men move in the same plane—to create a social dead-level. Protestations have been made against the prescribed, unvaried course of instruction in institutions of learning, and not always without reason. Such men as Lord Byron, Hugh Miller, and Dr. Kane were restless while made to pursue those branches of study in which they felt little interest, and indulged bystealth those special talents which God had given them. Educate together from their youth up such men as Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Goothe, Newton and Burns, La Place and Lamartine, Benjamin Franklin and Patrick Henry, and they might be made more ... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.