Book-Keeping and Accountantship, Elementary and Practical, Vol. 1 of 2 (Classic Reprint)

The design of the present work is to teach, by the shortest possible process, such parts of the subject of Book-keeping and Accountantship as are difficult to be mastered without a regular course of study, as Grammar, A rithmetic, or any other science. Great care has been taken to avoid wasting the pupils energies on mere matters of detail, which require no teaching; every part of the process involves something important for the man of business to know, and which it would be almost impossible to acquire without previous study. It is generally conceded that the best school-book is the one which presents the exercises of the student according to the most logical arrangement of its elementary principles. When the first exercise prepares the learner to understand the second, and the first and second are required to understand the third, and so on, until the subject is exhausted, teaching can go no further the rest is the legitimate work of the student. There are, in fact, two very distinct methods of treating a subject: the one by taking a certain amount of detail, and explaining it by reference to such principles as may happen to be involved ;the other, by analysing the whole subject, and giving such detail as is necessary to illustrate and enforce every principle. In the one case, principles are given to meet only part of the detail ;in the other, the detail is selected to enforce all the principles. The superiority of the latter method need not be insisted upon, the experienced teacher will recognise it as the great feature of those improvements which distinguish our school-books from those of the last century. The value of an exercise is not to be estimated by the probability of the question arising in exactly the same form in practice, but in proportion as it serves to render familiar some principle of general value that applies as well to a thousand cases.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)