§ 16. But the reflection by no means justifies the disgraceful waste of memory which goes on in most school-rooms. Much is learnt which, for want of the necessary repetition, will soon be lost again, besides much that would be valueless if remembered. The thing to aim at is not giving “useful knowledge,” but making the memory a store house of such facts as are good material for the other powers of the mind to work with; and that the facts may serve this purpose they must be such as the mind can thoroughly grasp and handle, and such as can be connected together. To _instruct is instruere_, “to put together in order, to build;” it is not cramming the memory with facts without connexion, and, as Herbert Spencer calls them, _unorganisable_. And yet a great deal of our children’s memory is wasted in storing facts of this kind, which can never form part of any organism. We do not teach them geography (_earth knowledge_, as the Germans call it), but the names of places. Our “history” is a similar, though disconnected study. We leave our children ignorant of the land, but insist on their getting up the “landmarks.” And, perhaps, from a latent perception of the uselessness of such work, neither teachers nor scholars ever think of these things as learnt to be remembered. They are indeed got up, as Schuppius says of the Logic of his day, _in spem futuræ oblivionis_. Latin grammar is gone through again and again, and a boy feels that the sooner he gets it into his head, the better it will be for him; but who expects that the lists of geographical and historical names which are learnt one half-year, will be remembered the next? I have seen it asserted, that when a boy leaves school, he has already forgotten nine-tenths of what he has been taught, and I dare say that estimate is quite within the mark.