The boy presently discovered that he could annoy Miss Stone mightily, and he lost no opportunity to do what he could in this direction.  It was contrary to the creed taught this good woman to inflict corporal punishment upon any child, and though “Dodd” aggravated her almost to desperation, and was malicious in his persecutions, yet she kept her hands off him.  Once or twice she tried some slight punishment, such as making him sit on the platform at her feet, or stand with his face in the corner, but these light afflictions the boy counted as joyous rather than grievous, and did as he chose more than ever.  He slyly unfastened one of Miss Stone’s shoestrings one day, when seated at her feet for penalty, and laughed when she tripped in it as she got up; and somehow or other, he would always put the whole room in a turmoil whenever placed with his face to the wall.

“Dodd” learned to read quite rapidly, however, having mastered his letters before he went to school, and having spelled a good many words on signs and in newspapers.  Before the end of the third week he had read his first reader through, one way or another, though he was still in the Chart Class, and having once been through the book, it lost many, if not most, of its charms for him thereafter.

But if his reader was so soon crippled for him, what shall be said of the work of the Chart Class, over which he went again and again, always in substantially the same way?

It may be said, and truthfully, that there were some pupils in the class who, even after going over and over the same lesson, for days and days, still did not master it, and so the class was not ready to move on; but it does not follow that therefore “Dodd” was not ready to move on.  This did follow, however, according to Miss Stone’s teaching, and according to the system adopted by multitudes of teachers East, West, North, and South.

I am well aware that there are teachers, plenty of them, whose spirits will rebel against the above insinuation, so, a word with you, ladies and gentlemen.

The system used by Miss Stone may have worked well enough in some other hands, but it should be remembered that it is not a system that can educate our children.  Nor is it a system—­any set of rules and formularies—­that can make our schools, any more than it is forms and ceremonies that make our churches.  These may all be well enough in their proper places, but there is nothing, absolutely nothing, in them, per se.  It is the righteousness of the Scribes and Pharisees in the one case, and the dry bones of pedagogy in the other,

The evil arises, in the schools as in the churches, from believing and acting as if there were something in the system itself.

If human nature were a fixed quantity, if any two children were alike, or anywhere nearly alike, if a certain act done for a child always brought forth the same result, then it might be possible to form an absolute system of pedagogy, as, with fixed elements, there is formed the science of chemistry.  But the quick atoms of spirit that manifest their affinities under the eye of that alchemist, the teacher, are far more subtle than the elements that go into the crucible in any other of Nature’s laboratories.