Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A SALEM DAME-SCHOOL. N English journal recently devoted some space to a discussion of the so-called " dame-school" of the rustic district, and concluded that its virtue, if indeed it possessed any, was of the smallest. It appears from this article that, while the authorities urge the superior benefit and training to be found in the parish schools, the villagers, with the doggedness of true lower-class ignorance, persist in. sending their children to the old dame, — the same, perchance, who taught them their own letters thirty or forty years before, and who depends upon the pittance earned by her labors to keep herself alive and out of the parish workhouse. Certainly all this is most ungrateful and vicious of the peasantry, and if they were a little more intelligent they would see thatthey have really no right to cut off the educational advantages of their children, just for the sake of a snuffy old woman, who makes her pupils sing the multiplication table through their noses, and who calls z "izzard." It is, however, a singular fact that this conservative clinging to old methods is not confined to English ploughmen, for it was not long ago that a well- known American divine spoke very warmly, at a meeting of the Round Table Club, in favor of the old methods of teaching. A lady of high breeding and of rather unusual culture added her opinion, saying,— " I want my boy to learn his letters exactly as I did, from a primer laid upon his teacher's knee; and I want the letters to be pointed out with a great brass pin, as mine were, and no other way." Such of us as have ever been to one of these dame-schools must, I think, always hold them in kindly and loving remembrance, and particularly is this true in regard to the dame-schools of Salem. In this ancient city these sch...