Following his reputed guide blindly, mechanically, and with whole-hearted devotion, the votary of the rule never allows his intuition, his faculty of direct perception and subconscious judgment, to play even for a moment round the matters on which he is engaged; and the result is that the faculty in question is not merely prevented from growing, but is at last actually blighted in the bud.

This is but another way of saying what I have already insisted upon,--that to forbid self-expression on the part of the child is to starve his perceptive faculties into non-existence.
There is no folly perpetrated in the elementary school of to-day for which there are not authoritative precedents to be found in the conduct of one or other of the two great schools which the God of Western theology is supposed to have opened for the education of Man.
And it is in that special development of the Legal School which is known as Pharisaism that we shall look for a precedent for the conventional teaching of arithmetic in our elementary schools.

The ultra-legalism of the Pharisee in the days of Christ finds its exact counterpart in the ultra-legalism of the child who has been taught arithmetic by the methods which the yearly examination fostered, and which are still widely prevalent.

In the one case there was, in the other case there is, an entire inability on the part of the zealous votary of the rule to estimate the intrinsic value of the results of his blind and unintelligent action.

The sense of humour, which is a necessary element in every other healthy sense, and which so often keeps us from going astray, by suddenly revealing to us the inherent absurdity of our proposed action, is one of the first faculties to succumb to the blighting influence of an ultra-legal conception of life.