Text-Books of Science Technical Arithmetic and Mensuration

Abstract

ARITHMETIC is a science as well as an art, and although the title of this book points solely to the art of arithmetic, we are bound to examine how far it has supported its right to a place in the series of text-books of science. The author says in the preface that “his experience has led him to believe that there is not much practical connection between successful teaching and logical sequence. The province of logic is to test ideas, not to impart them.” We venture to demur entirely to these propositions, and to assert that each successive idea acquired by the pupil should be made to follow logically from the ideas previously existing in the mind, and that ideas which cannot stand the test of logic are, in an educational point of view, worthless.

Text-Books of Science. Technical Arithmetic and Mensuration.

By Charles W. Merrifield (Longmans and Co.)