Note 72 — Chapter XX · AUTOMATIC CONTRASTED WITH SCIENTIFIC EDUCATION—Continued.

“Intellectual progress is of necessity from the concrete to the abstract. But regardless of this, highly abstract subjects such as grammar, which should come quite late, are begun quite early. Political geography, dead and uninteresting to a child, and which should be an appendage of sociological studies, is commenced betimes, while physical geography, comprehensible and comparatively attractive to a child, is in great part passed over. Nearly every subject dealt with is arranged in abnormal order—definitions and rules and principles being put first, instead of being disclosed, as they are in the order of nature, through the study of cases. And then, pervading the whole, is the vicious system of rote learning—a system of sacrificing the spirit to the letter....

“A leading fact in human progress is that every science is evolved out of its corresponding art. It results from the necessity we are under, both individually and as a race, of reaching the abstract by way of the concrete, that there must be practice and an accruing experience with its empirical generalizations before there can be science.”—“Education,” pp. 61, 124. By Herbert Spencer. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1883.