ECLECTIC SYSTEM DF Industrial, Freehand and Perspective Drawing BY CHRISTINA SULLIVAN, Teacher of Drawing in the Cincinnati Public Schools. A Rational and Economical System, Based on Sound and Practical Principles of Teaching. The ECLECTIC SYSTEM OF DRAWING has been prepared with reference to sound principles of teaching, difficulties of manual execution and logical order of principles. The system is based on knowledge acquired by practical experience in the class-room with pupils of every grade. The subject is presented in a practical and interesting manner. The ECLECTIC SYSTEM OF DRAWING is complete in nine books. Full directions and explanations accompany each number. These directions are printed on the cover, thus dispensing with extra guide books, and reducing the bulk and cost of the system. Any competent teacher can teach this system. BOOK I.-Twenty Pages.-First School Year. Location of Points, Connection of Points by Vertical, Horizontal and Oblique Lines. Division of Lines into two equal Parts. Book II.-Twenty Pages.-Second School Year. Location of Points and Division of Lines into two equal Parts. First Lessons in Tinting with Lines. BOOK III. Twenty Pages.-Third School Year. Further Practice on the Divisions given in Book II. First Lessons in Curved Lines. BOOK IV.-Twenty Pages-Fourth School Year. Compound Curves. Leaf Form Conventionalized. BOOK V. Twenty-four Pages.-Fifth School Year. Free-hand Construction of the Octagon and Hexagon. Use of Flower and Leaf Forms. BOOK VI-Twenty-four Pages. -Sixth School Year. Exercises in Original Designs for Surface Decoration. Firet Lessons in Mechanical Drawing. First Lessons in Perspective. BOOK VII.-Twenty-four Pages-Seventh School Year. Exercises in Design, Mechanical Drawing, and Perspective continued. First Lessons in Drawing from the Object. BOOK VIII. Twenty-four Pages. -Eighth School Year. Exercises in Design, Mechanical Drawing, Perspective and Object Drawing continued. Selections from the Grammar of Ornament of Designs for Surface Decoration. BOOK IX. Twenty-four Pages. -Ninth School Year. Exercises in Design, Mechanical Drawing, Perspective and Object Drawing continued. Hi toric Ornament. The Eclectic System of Drawing was adopted for exclusive use in the Public Schools of CINCINNATI, August 4th, 1884. Also adopted for DAYTON, 0. VAN ANTWERP, BRAGG & CO., Cincinnati. CLEVE AND PUBLIC LIBRARY -THE Ohio Éducational Monthly; ORGAN OF THE OHIO TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, PROCEEDINGS OF THE OHIO STATE TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION, AT LAKESIDE, OHIO, JULY 1, 2, AND 3, 1884. EVERY DAY DIFFICULTIES OF THE SCHOOL ROOM. BY HARRIET L. KEELER. I am not here to chant the chorus of a Jeremiad, the occasion does not demand, the circumstances do not warrant it. Any one whose public school experience covers a score of years, well knows the great advance which has taken place during that time, both in method and manner of teaching. What was formerly the practice of the few is now the habitual usage of the many; and this change has not taken place simply in the cities and larger towns, but in villages and country districts as well. The reason of this is not far to seek. It is by no means a truth that is hidden. Nor is it because the schoolmaster is abroad. The schoolmaster has been abroad, lo! these many years, yet no such advance can be credited to his efforts. It is due to the fact that the superintendent is abroad. There has at length appeared in the schools a person whose business it is to apply principles, observe results, compare methods, collate facts. The difficulty, heretofore, has been that the teacher had no opportunity to generalize. Working in isolation as he necessarily did, his vision was limited, his experience narrow, his premises incomplete, and his conclusions fre quently unwarranted. Working without the knowledge of others' achievements, he was unable to tell whether certain effects were actually produced by the cause to which he referred them or not. Those who have known admirable results to be gained through very insufficient means, because the personal power of the teacher compensated for the loss in method, will readily admit that no teacher alone, unaided, can develop any trustworthy principle in education. That seems a hard thing to say, but his own personal equation is too strong a factor. For the science of pedagogy is an inductive science, and the single teacher has his single fact and nothing more. He may happen upon correct principles, but he has no testimony to prove them; for it is by the experience of many that proof comes, and his next neighbor may, and probably will, deny his pet theory with perfect impunity. We all know that this has been the history of pedagogy in the past, and invariably what was one schoolmaster's meat, was another schoolmaster's poison. Simultaneous with the appearance of the superintendent, there appeared a class of teachers differing in many respects from those who preceded them. It is unnecessary to review the causes which brought about the change, but the thing itself was the presence in the schools of women, many of them young, bright, energetic, fairly well educated and determined to succeed. They were pushed by stress of circumstances into places never filled by women before, and as a result some wondrous discoveries were made. First, that they were admirably fitted for primary work. That youth and sympathy go a long way with children, and when supplemented by wise direction and mature experience, the result was better than had ever been attained before. Indeed, a superintendent found out that there was now some hope of having his ideas wrought out in the schools; and the fact that his method was new did not necessarily condemn it. It has since been held that women are useful in other positions beyond the pri mary-but I do not follow the thought-I wish only to call attention to the fact that where these two elements have been the strongest the advance has been greatest. The public schools are very near the hearts of the people, and I say this, despite the storm of adverse criticism under which they exist. Despite the frantic outcries against system; the charge that they educate away from labor; that they educate too much, or that they educate too little; that they are cast-iron, and so on ad finem. It is unnecessary to particularize; every one within the sound of my voice knows them perfectly. Any demagogue may start any cry, and he will number his followers by hundreds-yes, thousands-until he attempts to put his words into deeds, and actually to lay hands upon the schools; he then suddenly finds himself alone. To be sure a prominent man goes down here and there in the melee, but the schools are untouched or suffer only in spiritual loss of enthusiasm, courage and hope. It is an odd trick, this of the Anglo-Saxon race, to bait and worry every institution that it possesses, but it is characteristic. State and church and school feel the effects of it, daily. As Emerson puts it, "They have hit upon that capital invention of freedom, constitutional opposition." Together with this spiritual loss which cannot be measured, comes a fact patent to all who give the matter even cursory attention. It is the small and ever lessening number of young men who choose teaching as a life occupation, and enter upon it with steady purpose to continue therein. Many take it up for an especial object and then drop it-it bearing the same relation to other occupations that certain New England farms are said to bear to other more favored portions of the country-a good occupation to get out of. A lawyer trains his son to follow in his footsteps, a doctor frequently looks forward to the time when the burden of his profession shall fall upon the younger shoulders of his son, five generations of ministers have been known to follow in unbroken succession; but where is the teacher or superintendent who deliberately trains his son to his profession? Who could conscientiously recommend an occupation, at once so exacting and so precarious? If the bent of a young man's mind is strong enough to carry him to the schoolroom, notwithstanding what he knows he will find there, there is hope that his faith and enthusiasm will survive his first struggle with misapprehension, misrepresentation and injustice. Certain it is, that so long as he and such as he continue to live and labor, the noble army of saints and martyrs will not perish from the earth. Moreover, the American school is set face to face with a task the like of which has not appeared since the day when the Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and dwellers in Mesopotamia heard the apostolic instruction, each in his own tongue. The nations of the earth have gathered together once again, this time in America, and each nationality is to be instructed in language which it can comprehend. And, alas, for the teachers, no day of Pentecost can be expected. Our schools are made up of children whose parents represent not only the widest extremes of social position but of race difference. Children whose parents have fled to this country as a possible refuge from the oppressive conditions of their own lives, who are ignorant of our history, our institutions, our laws; children to whom the Revolution is a thing unknown, and for whom the civil war is at best a name. An alien population is already here asking to be adopted into the family of the Republic. In a single school I know of, are gathered Germans, Bohemians, Irish, Italians, Negroes, as well as native Americans. Out of this heterogeneous mass is to come forth, evoked by the teacher's potent influence, strength, wisdom, patriotism, self-reliance, in short, the stoic virtues of the heroic age. One of the great problems of the American school, an every day Banquo, who will not down, is what to do for these children, what to teach them no less than how to teach them. At the risk, perhaps, of being misunderstood, I shall touch upon another phase of the common school question, whose untoward influence is felt day by day. It is easy to understand how a popular institution dependent upon the votes of the masses must bend and sway, rise and fall, according to the fortunes of the ballot-box and the times; but how it is that the American Public who sincerely love their schools |