His teachers worked hard, though "not according to knowledge"; and he must do the same.

Active, in the higher sense of the word, he was never allowed to be; but he had to be actively receptive, strenuously automatic, or his teacher would know the reason why.
Such was the old _regime_.

Its defects were so grave and so vital that, now that it has become discredited (in theory, if not in practice), we can but wonder how it endured for so long.

As an ingenious instrument for arresting the mental growth of the child, and deadening all his higher faculties, it has never had, and I hope will never have, a rival.

Far from fostering the growth of those great expansive instincts--sympathetic, aesthetic, and scientific--which Nature has implanted in every child, it set itself to extirpate them, one and all, with ruthless pertinacity.