Maybe the teacher's nerves were
too highly strung to endure the squeaking of gritty pencils, but I
think the real reason for their banishment is, that slates invited
too strongly the game of noughts and crosses, or tit-tat-toe, three
in a row, the champion of indoor sports, and one entirely inimical
to the study of the joggerfy lesson. But if slates favored
tit-tat-toe, they also favored ciphering, and nothing but good can
come from that. Paper is now so cheap that you need not rub out
mistakes, but paper and pencil can never surely ground one in "the
science of numbers and the art of computing by them." What is
written is written, and returns to plague the memory, but if you
made a mistake on the slate, you could spit on it and rub it out
with your sleeve and leave no trace of the error, either on the
writing surface or the tables of the memory. What does the hymn
say?
"Forget the steps already trod,
And onward urge thy way."
The girls used to keep a little sponge and some water in a
discarded patchouli bottle with a glass stopper, to wash their
slates with; but it always seemed to me that the human and
whole-hearted way was otherwise.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic, - these three; and the greatest
of these three is arithmetic. Over against it stands grammar,
which may be said to be derived from reading and writing.
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