and, in addition to them, of arithmetic, completely opens the paths to an independent acquisition of all other knowledge. The masses, as though feeling the false relation to them, when they are offered incoherent scraps of all kinds of information, repel that lie from themselves, and say: "I need know but this much,--the church language and my own and the laws of the numbers, but that other knowledge I will take myself if I want it." Thus, if we admit freedom as the criterion of what is to be taught, the programme of the popular schools is clearly and firmly defined, until the time when the masses shall express some new demands. Church-Slavic and Russian and arithmetic to their highest possible stages, and nothing else but that. That is the determination of the limits of the programme of the popular school, which, however, does not presume that all three subjects be introduced systematically. With such a programme the attainment of symmetrical results in all three subjects would naturally be desirable; but it cannot be said that the predominance of one subject over another would be injurious. The problem consists only in keeping within the limits of the programme. It may happen that from the demands of the parents, and especially from the knowledge of the teacher, this or that subject will be more prominent,--with a clerical person the Church-Slavic language, with a teacher from a county school--either Russian or arithmetic; in all these cases the demands of the masses will be satisfied, and the instruction will not depart from its fundamental criterion. The second part of the question, how to teach, that is, how to discover which method is the best, has remained just as unsolved. Just as in the first part of the question of what to teach, the assumption that on the basis of reflections it is possible to build a programme of instruction leads to contradictory schools, so it is also with the question as to how to teach. Let us take the very first stage of the teaching of reading. One asserts that it is easier to teach so from cards; another--according to the _b_, _v_ system; a third--according to Korf; a fourth--according to the _be_, _ve_, _ge_ system, and so forth. It is said that the nuns teach reading in six weeks by the _buki-az_--_ba_ system. And every teacher, convinced of the superiority of his method, proves this superiority either by the fact that he teaches with it faster than others, or by reflections of the character which Mr. Bunákov and the German pedagogues adduce. At the present time, when there are thousands of examples, we ought to know precisely by what to be guided in our choice. Neither theory, nor reflections, nor even the results of instruction can show this completely.